Cataract surgeries at Charlottetown’s outpatient clinic are expected to resume in April, after procedures scheduled for March were cancelled due to the clinic reaching its annual funding target earlier than expected.

At a town hall event Monday night, Health and Wellness Minister Cory Deagle confirmed the private clinic has cancelled all of its appointments for this month because it has run out of funding.

“We had an agreement with Health P.E.I. to perform 3,600 cataracts within the fiscal year, April 1 to March 31, and … basically we achieved that by March 2,” Guy Boswall, medical director of the P.E.I. Vision Surgical Centre, told CBC News on Wednesday.

“We’ve done the number of cataract surgeries that they wanted us to do.”

Boswall confirmed that no surgeries have been performed since March 2, and all appointments for the rest of the month were cancelled.

“Very likely they will all be done sometime in April; they’ll certainly be done on a priority basis,” he said, adding that patients whose appointments were cancelled will not lose their place in line.

“I would be surprised if they’re not all done by the end of April.”

Boswall said the clinic is planning to resume operations April 1 when new funding becomes available at the start of the fiscal year.

The Charlottetown clinic is privately operated but funded by the provincial government. It’s the only cataract surgery centre on Prince Edward Island, Boswall said, with more complex cases requiring sedation or general anesthesia handled at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

Boswall said discussions were held last month about continuing surgeries beyond the 3,600-procedure cap.

As the clinic approached its annual target, Boswall met with Health P.E.I.’s chief operating officer, Chris Nickerson, in February to talk about extending operations through the rest of March.

But doing so would have required approval from the P.E.I. Treasury Board, which ultimately did not happen in time, he said.

“One of the things we certainly agreed upon was that next year we need to meet much earlier,” Boswall said.

“I’ll make sure that happens next year and we’ll assess the situation at that time and together decide whether or not we should continue above and beyond the 3,600.”

Boswall said the clinic bills the province monthly for completed procedures.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Health P.E.I. said it picked a target of 3,600 surgeries based on similar models around Atlantic Canada.

“Discussions are ongoing about whether the cap will be increased for 2026/2027. Exceeding the cap for this year or increasing the cap for next year would require approval by the Treasury Board,” the statement reads.

“As of late 2025, more than 65 per cent of patients had their surgery within the national benchmark of 16 weeks. This is the strongest performance on meeting the cataract wait‑time benchmark since 2016.”

While the spokesperson said the final financials for 2026 are not available, the amount the province paid to the clinic for the first year of its operation — from December 2024 to the end of November 2025 — was nearly $4.4 million.

When asked what could prevent similar disruptions in the future, Boswall said one idea would be to remove the annual cap altogether.

“The best model would be for us to simply be able to see patients and do their cataract surgery as quick as possible.”

Wait times improving

Boswall estimates the clinic has performed about 5,400 surgeries since it opened. He said wait times for cataract surgery on P.E.I. have improved significantly as a result.

“If we go back to before the clinic opened, I would say the wait to see me would have been in excess of two years, and then the wait for surgery would have been in excess of a year,” he said.

“At the present time, I would say we’re looking at about a year to see me, and then probably two or three months to have surgery. So 15 months at the most.”

Boswall added the clinic is able to complete more procedures each day with fewer staff than in hospital settings.

“It’s been very successful,” he said.

“The wait times have reduced very significantly, and are continuing to be reduced, so that a year from now, I have no doubt that we will be in a better spot than we are right now.”