The average patient in the Ontario emergency room waited an hour and 54 minutes to see a doctor in April of this year, tying a record previously set in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Health Quality Ontario says waiting times reached the 1.9-hour mark for the third time in 14 months, rising steadily each month since January 2022, when average waiting times fell at 1.5 hours.
For patients considered to be of “low urgency” who ultimately did not require hospitalization, the average time spent in the ER was three hours and more than three-quarters of patients completed their time in hospital. within the four-hour target set by the province.
Patients considered “high urgency” spent an average of 4.5 hours in the hospital, with 90% of them completing their time in the ER within the eight-hour goal set by the province. .
In Toronto, the highest average waiting times in April were observed at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center, with patients waiting three hours and eighteen minutes.
Emergency room doctor Dr. David Carr told CP24 that June is not the time when emergency rooms should explode.
“I can say that June is historically one of our slowest months of the year, as respiratory viruses often go away. These are unprecedented waiting times.”
“It almost seems like the new rule is that people are waiting five to ten hours to see an emergency doctor for an average complaint.”
In Toronto, the highest average waiting times in April were observed at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center, with patients waiting three hours and eighteen minutes.
Across the GTA, the worst waiting times were seen at Oakville-Trafalgar Memorial Hospital, where patients spent an average of three hours and thirty minutes.
The lowest average waiting time was seen at the Southlake Regional Health Center in Newmarket.
Patients who went there in April waited an average of 36 minutes to be treated.
Ontario ER patients waited five hours, the longest absolute in the province, on the metropolitan campus of Windsor Regional Hospital.
Doctors and nurses say a combination of delayed care for fear of visiting a hospital during a pandemic, patients without a family doctor and exhaustion of health care staff contributes to increased waiting times.
“What is not is an overabundance of patients with COVID. What is is very exhaustion, a lot of illness, many doctors do not work the hours they did before, a great loss of nurses in the profession,” Carr said. “Patients have not had access to face-to-face care the way they are used to, so combine all these factors with the fact that we have an aging population that has not been well cared for in the last two years.”