The typical wait in Quebec emergency rooms is getting longer and longer. According to a study by the Montreal Economic Institute (IEDM) released Thursday, the median length of an emergency room stay is now 5 hours and 11 minutes, or 40 minutes more than four years ago.
These data take into account all patients who come to the emergency room and who are seen at the triage.
If only stretcher patients are included, the wait is even longer. Compared to 2018, the median length of their stay has increased by two hours, to reach 11 hours and 19 minutes, reveals the analysis of the MEI.
Its author, economist Emmanuelle B. Faubert, points out that these figures had dropped markedly in 2020, “because at the heart of the pandemic, few people went to the emergency room”. However, the curve has since resumed its upward trend.
From the outset, the number of patients who spent more than 24 hours on a stretcher has increased sharply in four years. In 2018, this sad fate was reserved for 16% of patients; in 2022, it was one in four patients. As for people who spent 48 hours or more on hold, they were almost three times more numerous in 2022 than in 2018 (64,214 compared to 22,744).
The IEDM says it prefers the median to the average in these matters, the median better representing “the real situation of patients”. Since it corresponds to the midpoint of a sample, the median dampens the effect of very high or very low values in this kind of calculation.
Worst in the greater Montreal area
The study also shows that in 2022 as in 2018, it is still in the outskirts of Montreal that we wait the longest. Thus, in 2022, the typical wait in emergency rooms in the Laurentians was 7 hours and 16 minutes, more than double what was observed in the region where this value is lowest, the Lower Saint-Laurent (3 hours and 6 minutes).
For the neoliberal think tank, this increase in emergency room waiting times is one more argument in favor of an increased role for private health care. “These findings show that the system is inefficient and fails to provide the care patients need,” notes M.me Faubert.
The study comes out two days following the Ministry of Health took a step closer to opening private mini-hospitals in Quebec and Montreal. An initiative that Mme Faubert does not fail to boast. “The private mini-hospitals planned by the Legault government might help unclog emergency rooms,” she says.
The data processed by the MEI comes from the Ministry of Health. They were obtained through access to information requests.
