Quebec’s health experts say patients shouldn’t be allowed to see up-to-date wait times in hospital emergency rooms, while other provinces’ health ministries are opening that data to the public.
Alberta’s health ministry recently created an iPhone app and launched a website showing current wait times in Calgary emergency rooms, updated every two minutes.
“A large focus (in creating the website and app) was of course due to the wait times that existed and wanting to be open and transparent around what those times are,” said Don Stewart, spokesman for Alberta Health Services.
Ontario has a website with wait times updated monthly, and one Ontario hospital announced last month it will install a television that will show patients up-to-date wait times while they wait.
To some Quebec health experts, this is bad news.
This information shouldn’t be online, they say, and emergency-room nurses shouldn’t tell patients how long they need to wait to see a doctor.
“It can be harmful to patients,” says André Poitras, chief nurse at the emergency department of Hotel-Dieu hospital on St-Urbain St.
Poitras says a patient with deceptively minor symptoms who knows there’s a long wait ahead may decide to leave, and could die. It’s better wait in the hospital, where a triage nurse will see you within minutes and move you to the front of the line if necessary, and doctors are around in case your condition worsens.
This could be one reason Quebec’s health ministry instructs its hospitals not to tell patients how long they’ll have to wait. That advice is in black-and-white on page 38 of the government’s 250-page guide that tells hospitals how to run emergency rooms: “it is not recommended to display the real wait times.”
“This information is useless,” says Claude Lemay, who manages the Quebec office of the Canadian Institute for Health Information, a not-for-profit corporation that provides pan-Canadian health information.
This may seem strange, since Lemay’s organization produces reports on wait times in hospital emergency departments. And he knows off-hand that the average duration, from entrance to exit, of a visit to a Montreal emergency room is 12 hours.
But he says the public might misinterpret daily reports.
“The average wait time for an emergency room varies extremely,” explains Lemay, and patients shouldn’t choose a hospital based on its recent performance. “If you were to find today one (hospital) has a 12-hour wait and another has a 24-hour wait, it does not really matter where you decide to go.”
The main reason is that emergency rooms don’t serve people in the order they arrive. Unlike in clinics, where Poitras and Lemay say wait-time information would be useful, hospitals triage patients and serve them in order of importance. Emergency-room doctors will sprint to save the life of a heart-attack victim, while people with sprained ankles may wait all day.
The Agence de la Santé et des Services Sociaux de Montréal has a table on its website with a daily breakdown of how many beds are used in each emergency department (most are usually over 100 per cent), but wait times aren’t public.
“It’s not possible to give the waiting time,” says Agency spokesman Hugo Larouche. “There are way too many variables.”
“If we add a column, ‘number of hours of waiting,’ and a person arrives and it says two hours and goes to the emergency room and waits three hours, you can understand the level of frustration of patients could be difficult to manage.”
Health experts in Quebec agree that anybody with a health problem should first call Info-Santé at 8-1-1, then go to a clinic if the situation isn’t urgent, or an emergency room if it is.
