Reports of high average wait times at hospital emergency rooms across the country were punctuated by CTV News medical correspondent Avis Favaro’s latest story focusing on the dire consequences long wait times at crowded ERs can have on patients.
In light of studies showing patients admitted to ERs are waiting longer to get into an acute care bed, CTVNews.ca has collected wait time data over a recent time period from a selection of hospitals in cities across Canada, to give you a snapshot of the wait times Canadians are dealing with.
Interesting decisions on which hospitals to highlight. They list the Jewish General for Montreal, but not the Royal Victoria with its 6 hour average wait time.
I think they’re also being selective about what time of day they’re reporting. Their source claims that my local hospital has an average wait of 3 hours, and it does, briefly, at 8 am just after the shift change. The rest of the day is anywhere between 5-12 hours (or more), but I guess we don’t talk about that.
It’s definitely strange considering for Alberta they are showing every hospital in Calgary and Edmonton
It’s due to the capabilities of the wait times reporting system. Alberta has integrated reporting on all acute care sites, updated every 2 minutes, due to having a single organization (AHS) overseeing the IT and reporting infrastructure of every hospital in the province.
While the MUHC/CUSM has an emergency department, that’s not really their focus; they are also notorious for long ER wait times. In that sense, selecting them for this list would not be fair. Since the Jewish is the same health network, it makes more sense to chose them. Same with Saint Mary’s.
In that sense I think they chose right.
Wait why not? Selecting them seems ideal to represent wait times, cause I dont think anyone should have to wait at the er for hours
Mostly because of the specialization. The Jewish is specialized in ER (and super innovative at it too!). So they make the most sense to compare for ER. Anyone waiting at the Royal Vic should be their for one of their specialties (like EPRAC and chest). The children’s hospital (part of the Glen complex which includes the Royal Vic) has extremely low ER wait times. And so it should. Cannibalization of children’s ressources to supply the Vic’s ER defeats the purpose of specialization.
All this to say: the Royal Vic should maintain high wait times, to incentive prospective patients to go to hospitals that specialize in ER and have better wait time.
Montréal has enough hospitals that you can think of it like each department in a normal hospital having its own hospital. Sure they different depts/hospitals can do things outside their scope, but it’s not ideal.
Not surprised to see Manitoba has some of the longest wait times in the country, the provincial government has been gutting our health services for years.
Last time I went to the emergency center (pre-covid) I was with a friend who had broken his leg, and they had us waiting for more than 8 hours.
Yeah. I’m pretty sure I had a heart attack in early 2021, so in the morning I called my Dr and she just told me to go to emerg. But emerg’s were backed up for 24+ hours due to another wave of COVID and I lived out of town on a farm.
Didn’t even try to go then, and after it was too late anyway.
Pallister really screwed up our healthcare and Heather has done absolutely nothing to fix it.
This is a bit of a tangent, but I’m curious who runs this website: http://www.edwaittimes.ca/WaitTimes.aspx
It’s always been slow for me, and it doesn’t feel that accessible (text is hard to read etc.). A quick upgrade and refresh might make it a lot smoother for people. If we wanted to go more fancy with it, it could have a dashboard page just for hospitals to display in their ERs, like they do (did?) at MSJ.
I know BC has a Github with open source projects, and this seems like a relatively simple upgrade if we knew what the API / data source was. I’m noticing some AJAX & jquery. Could something like Vue/Nuxt work as a replacement? The pages could be rendered server side, and then every 5 minutes it could be refreshed with the new data.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Reports of high average wait times at hospital emergency rooms across the country were punctuated by CTV News medical correspondent Avis Favaro’s latest story focusing on the dire consequences long wait times at crowded ERs can have on patients.
Alberta has data updated every two minutes for emergency rooms and urgent care in Calgary, Edmonton, Grande Prairie, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat and Red Deer.
Saskatchewan has a website for live emergency department wait times updated every 15 minutes, though the service has been temporarily unavailable.
The chart below depicts daily average times in the waiting room for the whole province and select hospitals for the month of June 2023.
The chart below depicts daily average times in the waiting room for the whole province and select hospitals.
Wait times at emergency rooms in the Northwest Territories are not available, but the following link contains contact information for health facilities across N.W.T.
The original article contains 547 words, the summary contains 149 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
