Alberta shows a lack of improvement when it comes to emergency room wait times: report
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Alberta's emergency room wait times are just as long as they were last year for the median patient, according to a new report by the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI).
The median Albertan spent three hours and 48 minutes in the emergency room in 2024 — an increase of 54 minutes since 2020. According to the report, the Edmonton region had the highest median wait time at five hours and 54 minutes, followed by the Calgary region at four hours and 42 minutes.
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British Columbians are waiting longer to get care in emergency rooms and the situation is the worst it's been in the last five years, according to a new national report looking at emergency room wait times across the country. The report by the Montreal Economic Institute found that the median length of stay in a B.C. emergency room — calculated from the time a patient registers to when they are discharged or are admitted to the hospital — was four hours and 13 minutes in 2024, up from just over three hours in 2019. 'Throughout the years, B.C. has remained somewhere in the middle of the pack, never the worst, never the best,' said report author and economist Emmanuelle B. Faubert on Wednesday. 'But while they're not doing the most poorly out of the provinces, there's still improvement that can be done.' Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. The median wait time indicates that 50 per cent of patients waits more and 50 per cent waits less. The longest waiting times in the country were in Quebec, where ER patients' median wait was nearly 5 1/2 hours and shortest in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the median wait time was two hours and 45 minutes. Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia were not included due to lack of submitted data. Reports of long waiting times at emergency rooms in B.C. are not new. A patient visiting Eagle Ridge Hospital in Port Moody shared a photo of a handwritten sign posted at the ER early Tuesday morning that said the wait time to see a doctor was 12 hours. Fraser Health said the sign was not made or posted by the health authority, although it acknowledged the emergency department saw 'higher-than-normal patient volumes' and 'unexpected staffing challenges.' A 'significant' number of patients did not require urgent care, and many of them had to wait longer to get care, it said in a statement. This isn't the first time rogue signs have appeared at Eagle Ridge, which has consistently reported some of the longest ER waiting times among Metro Vancouver hospitals. It placed 20th out of 29 emergency rooms in B.C. with a median wait time of four hours and 24 minutes, according to the report from the Montreal think-tank. Late last year, photos of signs saying the hospital's ER was closed due to overcapacity circulated on social media. The sign was false Fraser Health said at the time. It was unclear who wrote the note, but it appeared to be from frustrated staff who urged the public to contact Port Coquitlam MLA Mike Farnworth to 'help us advocate' to keep the ER open 'so that we can do our jobs and attend to every patient requiring emergency care in a timely fashion.' In 2023, doctors at Eagle Ridge, along with colleagues at Royal Columbian Hospital, penned an open letter sounding the alarm over long waiting times, overcrowding and patient safety at the two hospitals' emergency departments due to a shortage of ER doctors and nurses. In B.C., the shortest ER waiting time was at Providence Health's Mount Saint Joseph Hospital in Vancouver (a median wait of two hours and 54 minutes), said the report. Fraser Health's Fraser Canyon Hospital in Hope (three hours) had the next shortest waits followed by Vancouver Coastal's UBC Health Sciences Centre (three hours and six minutes). The worst performer was Abbotsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Centre (six hours and 36 minutes), followed by Island Health's Royal Jubilee Hospital (six hours and 18 minutes) and Vancouver General Hospital (five hours and 18 minutes). The report chalked up longer waiting times partly to a lack of access to primary care and lack of options for people with minor emergencies. It recommended Canada adopt clinics similar to ones operating in France called immediate medical care centres to fill in what it called the missing middle of emergency care to treat low priority cases, such as fractures or infections. Faubert said the French clinics are similar to B.C.'s urgent care centres but are privately run, which Faubert argued would face less bureaucratic red tape to get set up and operating and have more flexibility in terms of scheduling and staffing. 'Also, having clinics run and operated by government means it can be slower to spread across the province and the country,' she said. 'There's limitations when you have control that is very centralized.' At an unrelated news conference on Tuesday, B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne said the long waiting times at B.C. emergency departments speak to the larger context of the global shortage of health care workers. She said that's why the provincial government has been working to build up its primary care system, establish urgent care clinics, fast-tracking credentials of U.S.-trained doctors and U.S.-registered nurses, and ramping up recruitment efforts to attract U.S.-based health care workers to come work in B.C. chchan@
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Patients in N.B. face even longer waits in emergency rooms, report says
New Brunswick emergency room patients faced a typical wait of about four and a half hours in 2024-25, according to a new report by an independent public-policy think-tank. That median wait — the length of stay from arrival in the ER to discharge or admission to hospital — increased by nearly half an hour over the previous fiscal year and by nearly an hour over 2020-21, the report by the Montreal Economic Institute, known as MEI, says. "The situation is getting worse," said MEI economist Emmanuelle Faubert, who wrote the report, titled Canadians Are Waiting Too Long in the Emergency Room. "And that is a trend that we see all across Canada." Although the report indicates median waits last year ranged from two hours and 45 minutes in Newfoundland and Labrador to five hours and 23 minutes in Quebec, comparisons between provinces should be taken with a grain of salt, Faubert said, because of potential differences in the way they each collect and measure their data. Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan aren't included in the report because they did not provide the requested data, she said. WATCH | 'All across Canada, the situation is getting worse,' says report's author: Stuck in the ER? Wait times are up across N.B., report says 3 hours ago Duration 2:37 A report from the Montreal Economic Institute, a think tank in Quebec, found New Brunswick emergency room patients faced a typical wait of about four and a half hours in 2024-25. That's nearly an hour over 2020-21 wait times. The New Brunswick median wait is based on about 490,000 patient visits to Horizon and Vitalité emergency rooms and represents the middle value of the lengths of stay of all patients, meaning half waited longer, and half less, Faubert said. The median is considered a better statistical measure than the average, she said, because it's less affected by extreme cases and more likely to represent a typical visit. Faubert attributes the increase in waits to a shortage of primary-care providers and a lack of options to deal with minor emergencies. France model could help address 'missing middle' She encourages the New Brunswick government and other provinces to adopt a new model being used in France — immediate medical care centres. These independent clinics, which are generally privately owned by the health-care providers who operate them, specialize in handling non-life-threatening emergencies, such as bone fractures, wounds that require stitches, and infections, Faubert said. This helps reduce the pressure on ERs and fill the "missing middle" when it comes to urgent care. "They fall into a sphere where there's less bureaucracy, there's more place for innovation and less having to ask the government for anything anytime they want to implement a new strategy," she said. "That is what is currently happening in the public sector." Privatization 'a terrible recommendation' Dr. Fraser Mackay, an emergency physician in Saint John and chair of the rural, remote and small urban section of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, calls that "a terrible recommendation." "It's an ideological approach that promotes privatization of health care, siloing of health care, lack of accountability and basically taking us in the wrong direction." Mackay said there's no denying wait times are getting worse across New Brunswick and across the country, and are "terrible almost everywhere you go," particularly in bigger centres. He supports making that data public and making citizens aware. But the MEI report is "impressively off the mark" in terms of its conclusions and advice, he said. Mackay contends the main driver of emergency department waits "has nothing to do with" access to primary care or the acuity of the patients in the waiting room. "People with low acuity problems, I can see them really fast, but I need a place to see them … and available nursing staff," he said. The problem is ER patients who have been admitted but can't be moved to a hospital unit because no beds are available, so they're tying up ER space and resources, said Mackay. "It is an outflow problem … not an inflow problem." While the French model might sound good on paper, it doesn't recognize our finite pool of doctors and nurses either, Mackay said. "If you're staffing that clinic, where are you getting that staff from? Because we have trouble staffing our emergency departments as it is." Hybrid system best, author says Faubert could not immediately say what would be required to set up such centres in New Brunswick or how much it might cost, but did say patient services should still be covered by provincial health insurance. "Of course if we plan to turn this into a reality, we need to dig deeper into how it would work," she said. "But as a concept it has shown that it does work in France, and we think that if it can be adapted to the Canadian environment then it could be beneficial." Asked if she and MEI are pro-privatization, Faubert did not answer directly. "The thing is, we've been putting more money into health care, more and more every year, and what we're seeing is that it's not working," she said. "When we look elsewhere in the world, in some of the most efficient countries with the best health-care systems, essentially all of them are hybrid. "They do have a public system, but they also have private, independent providers, and they work together to make sure that the population gets access to the care that they need." Health department works to expand collaborative teams The Department of Health is still reviewing the report but does "recognize that some New Brunswickers have struggled to access services in a timely fashion at hospital emergency departments," said spokesperson Sean Hatchard. It's working with Horizon and Vitalité, who are responsible for day-to-day operations, to make improvements, including filling health-care positions as quickly as possible, he said in an emailed statement. It's also working to expand family health teams across the province to improve access to primary care and ease pressure on the ERs, Hatchard said. While Premier Susan Holt pledged in last year's election campaign to open 30 collaborative care clinics over four years, existing community care clinics that adopt the family health team model are now being counted among them. So far this year, teams have been announced in Fredericton, Lamèque, Tantramar, and Carleton North. Some other initiatives that divert patients away from ERs include NB Health Link, eVisitNB, and expanded roles for pharmacists, who can now prescribe for 12 common ailments, Hatchard said. Vitalité works on patient flow Improving access to primary health care and optimizing patient flow are two of Vitalité's strategic priorities, according to an unsigned emailed statement. Since 2022, Vitalité has established 26 local family health teams, enabling the regional health authority to care for nearly 32,000 additional patients and divert some non-urgent demand away from hospitals, the unidentified spokesperson said. Vitalité has also implemented a number of initiatives to expedite discharges and reduce occupancy rates, which in turn shorten emergency department stays by increasing access to acute care beds, according to the email. These include discharge planning upon admission and the integration of tracking tools. Horizon did not provide comments Tuesday. More New Brunswick numbers Horizon hospital patients faced the longest ER waits, with a median length of stay of four hours and 51 minutes, compared to three hours and 21 minutes at Vitalité hospitals, the MEI report says. Horizon's Moncton Hospital had the longest median ER visits in the province at seven hours and 22 minutes, followed by the Saint John Regional Hospital at six hours and 37 minutes, and the Dr. Everett Chalmers Regional Hospital at six hours and 25 minutes. The Sussex Health Centre, which lost its overnight ER services in 2022, was a clear outlier, with a median wait of only 18 minutes, according to the report. Among Vitalité hospitals, Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Joseph de Saint-Quentin patients had the shortest median wait, at one hour and thirty-five minutes, while patients at the Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre in Moncton had the longest at five hours and 54 minutes.
