Emergency room waits posted online for Hamilton hospitals

Times are updated every 15 minutes, and show busiest periods

Patients can now get a rough idea of how long they will wait to see a doctor at Hamilton’s emergency rooms and urgent care centres before deciding where to seek care.

Hamilton Health Sciences and St. Joseph’s Healthcare are together providing real-time average waits online — updated every 15 minutes — for each of their sites as well as a graph to show when it’s busiest.

It’s not an exact measure because emergency departments do not operate on a first-come, first-served basis.

The sickest and most urgent patients are seen first so wait times vary substantially.

But the website hamiltonemergencywaittimes.ca lets patients see for themselves what kind of delay they’re facing.

They can also see what site has the fastest average time over the last six hours from arrival at the front desk to seeing a doctor.

“Patients are forever frustrated when they show up and they wait several hours,” said Dr. Greg Rutledge, chief of the department of emergency medicine at St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton.

He said the goal is to “empower” patients by giving them the information they need to pick a site with a shorter wait or to come to the hospital when it’s less busy.

“Patients are more tech savvy so it’s allowing them an opportunity to be part of their care and make decisions about their care,” said Rutledge.

“This is the first of what will likely be many of those changes as we enter a new generation of health-care provision.”

Hamilton’s hospitals are late to the movement toward providing real-time emergency room waits online.

St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener was the first in the province to post its wait-time clock in April 2012.

At the time, Hamilton’s hospitals said they were considering doing the same.

Within four months of going live, St. Mary’s reported a 20 per cent drop in the number of less-urgent patients going to the emergency department.

As a result, its wait time shortened by at least an hour for the least sick patients and as much as six hours for those needing to be admitted to hospital.

“Patients and families have told us they value the clock because it allows them the opportunity to plan and to have an idea of what to expect,” Gary Higgs, vice-president and chief information officer at St. Mary’s, said in a statement.

“Overall the clock is a helpful guide.” The clock is clearly popular with Kitchener patients as years after it was introduced, it continues to see an increasing number of page views — to 8,975 a month by November 2019 from 7,740 a month the year before.

Posting wait times has also made a difference in the city of Windsor, where emergency room staff have reported wasting noticeably less time on getting asked how long it might be to see a doctor.

“When you are at an airport, a train station or a bus station, it tells you the wait time and we’re able to give that data now to patients,” said Steve Erwin, spokesperson for Windsor Regional Hospital.

“Before they even come in the doors, it gives them a head’s up.”

Windsor has been providing emergency wait times online since 2012, but vastly improved its clock in 2018. It includes the number of patients waiting and being treated, which Hamilton’s does not.

Another key difference is that Windsor reports average wait times for lessurgent patients only.

Hamilton’s average includes all patients.

It makes quite a difference, as Windsor’s waits were more than five hours for much of Wednesday, while the highest times reported in Hamilton were roughly half of that.

At times, Hamilton hospitals showed waits of less than one hour.

In comparison, the urgent care centre on Main Street West, which primarily sees noncritical patients, reported a wait of more than four hours Wednesday evening.

“Our initial inclination is that it has had a difference in terms of people looking online and saying, ‘OK maybe there is a clinic option instead that might be a bit quicker,” said Erwin about Windsor.

“That kind of diversion from our emergency departments is really important.”

Hamilton has included information on its site about how to find a family doctor, area walk-in clinics and when to go to the hospital.

The hospitals also plan to research the effect of the site as there are some concerns associated with posting emergency room wait times.

“One is that someone who needs care chooses not to come because they view the waits as too long and that would not be ideal,” said Rutledge.

“The other is that they choose to go to an institution where the services don’t match their needs, such as a kidney patient who goes to Hamilton General when nephrology is at St. Joe’s.

“The message is, if you have a complicated illness that requires the services of a certain facility, they should be making the decision to still attend the facility regardless of the wait times,” he added.