The average Ontario emergency room patient waited nearly two hours to see a doctor in April of this year, and GTA physicians tell CP24 that number has likely only increased since.
Health Quality Ontario says wait times hit the 1.9 hour mark for the third time in the past 14 months, climbing steadily each month since January 2022 when average wait times fell to 1.5 hours.
For patients considered “low urgency” who did not eventually require admission to hospital, the average time spent in the ER was three hours, and more than three-quarters of patients completed their time in hospital within the provincially-mandated target of four hours.
Patients considered “high-urgency” spent an average of 4.5 hours in hospital, with 90 per cent of them completing their time in the ER within the provincially-mandated target of eight hours.
Emergency room physician Dr. David Carr says the rising trend in wait times has continued at University Health Network into June.
“I can say that June is historically one of our slowest months of the year as respiratory virus typically disappear. These are unprecedented wait times.”
“It almost seems like the new norm is that people are waiting from five to ten hours to see an emergency room physician for an average complaint.”
In Toronto, the highest average wait times in April were seen at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, with patients waiting three hours and eighteen minutes.
Across the GTA, the worst wait times were seen at Oakville-Trafalgar Memorial Hospital, where patients spent an average of three hours and thirty minutes.
Asked about its average wait time, an Oakville Trafalgar Memorial Hospital spokesperson said its ER saw a greater number of patients than average in April 2022, and they required more complex levels of care.
"Some of the compounding factors include patients coming to the Emergency Department with illnesses that are more severe and requiring a greater level of care," spokesperson Laura Zilke told CP24. "It is also reflective of COVID-19 related illnesses in our communities, which translated into a higher rate of staff and physician absences due to isolation requirements following COVID-19 exposure. This was particularly relevant during the period you reference, April 2022."
"Additionally, similar to the rest of the province, our hospital has experienced higher than normal pressure for acute care inpatient beds as our teams work to relieve backlogs. As patients arrive through the Emergency Department, the capacity pressures in the acute care inpatient areas means it often takes longer for patients to be admitted as needed."
The absolute lowest average wait time was seen at Southlake Regional Health Centre in Newmarket.
Patients who went there in April waited 36 minutes to be seen on average.
Ontario ER patients waited five hours, the absolute longest in the province - at Windsor Regional Hospital’s Metropolitan Campus.
ER Dr. Kashif Pirzada says the two hour average is deceptive, as it includes times of day where emergency rooms are lightly used.
“Most people come in evenings and nighttime when there’s fewer staff, so usually that number is much higher, from four to six hours or so.”
“It’s pretty much the worst I have seen it in my 15 years of practice.”
Doctors and nurses say a combination of care delayed over fears of visiting a hospital during the pandemic, patients without a family doctor and healthcare worker burnout is contributing to rising wait times.
“What it’s not is an overabundance of patients with COVID. What it is is a lot of burnout, a lot of illness, a lot of physicians are not working the hours they were doing before, a huge loss of nurses in the profession,” Carr said. “Patients have not had access to in-person care in the way that they are used to and then you couple all of these factors with the fact we have an aging population that hasn’t been well looked after in the past couple of years.”
Pirzada said he is seeing a number of people with what he classifies as “post-COVID symptoms.”
“There really is nowhere to send them, it’s a new problem that the system really hasn’t addressed yet.”
A Sept. 2021 brief by the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table estimated there were up to 78,000 people suffering from sustained long-COVID symptoms in the province.
