TORONTO - Ontario cancer patients are still waiting twice as long as recommended for urgent and potentially life-saving surgery, despite the government's much-touted efforts to reduce health-care wait times, the Ontario Health Quality Council reported Tuesday.

In its annual report, the watchdog agency said wait times were down for hip and knee replacements, cataract surgeries and cardiac procedures, but warned over half of Ontario cancer patients who need urgent surgery still face a month-long wait instead of the recommended two weeks.

"Everyone knows that being diagnosed with an aggressive cancer is a devastating moment in one's life," council CEO Dr. Ben Chan told reporters.

"The last thing you want to hear at that moment is that surgery could be delayed for up to four weeks."

Reducing cancer surgery wait times doesn't have to cost hospitals a lot of money, insisted Chan, who said North York General implemented new management practices and "figured out how to meet all of its cancer surgery targets without large scale restructuring or great expense."

North York General will be a great case study for other hospitals to follow, said Health Minister David Caplan.

"We know that there are practices out there, we know there are things we can do," Caplan said in an interview.

"Even Dr. Chan himself said it's not a question of resources, it's a question of will."

Wait times to get into Ontario nursing homes and long-term care facilities have doubled in two years, and are especially bad in the Ottawa area, said council chair Lyn McLeod.

"It's pretty clear that everyone involved in delivering health care has to take action," said McLeod.

The government has implemented a $1.1 billion, two-year strategy to help seniors live at home with "a little bit of support" to help keep the pressure off nursing homes and shorten those waiting lists, said Caplan.

The council said Ontario is producing more doctors than ever before, but access to family doctors has not improved since 2006. About 7.4 per cent of adults don't have a family physician, and half of that group - about 400,000 people - are actively looking for a doctor but can't find one.

More than half of Ontario patients who need to see a specialist wait more than one month, compared with a one week wait in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands.

The report also said Ontario does twice as many MRI scans as it did just a few years ago, but patients still wait up to 120 days for an MRI, well over the target of 28 days.

The council also feels it's crucial that the controversy surrounding the management of eHealth Ontario doesn't push back the province's 2015 date for implementing electronic health records, said McLeod.

"Obviously there are issues that are being addressed," said McLeod, who refused to comment on Sunday's sudden removal of eHealth CEO Sarah Kramer.

"We're concerned that we continue to make progress on something that we think is already somewhat late in terms of its importance to patients."

The New Democrats said the report shows Ontario is failing to get cancer patients the surgery they need on time because of poor co-ordination by the various health professionals involved, a problem they said could be solved with electronic health records.

"It's all tangled up in a big mess," said NDP health critic France Gelinas.

"And the losers at the end are people with serious cancers who may risk dying, suffering needlessly or have serious side effects from their cancer because the surgery wasn't done on time."

Ontario has made "no progress whatsoever" towards creating electronic health records, said Progressive Conservative critic Elizabeth Witmer, a former health minister.

"This government has squandered well over $700 million without any progress, and the council indicated that instead of being leaders we are laggards in Canada," complained Witmer.

The U.S. Veterans Administration is probably the best example of working electronic health records, where a patient from anywhere in the United States can show up at any military hospital and physicians will have electronic access to the individual's medical records.