Wait times at Winnipeg’s emergency rooms

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/12/2014 (4233 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg’s emergency rooms have been seeing a rush of flu patients this holiday season, which prompted us to take a look wait times data pulled from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority website. The WRHA posts a snapshot of ERs in the system, showing the number of patients, average wait time and longest non-urgent wait time at any given point in time, updated every five minutes.

Local programmer and writer Sean Walberg decided to ‘scrape’ – extract – the data posted to the WRHA website back in September, 2013. His program has since been scraping this data about every five minutes and plugging it all into a neat little spreadsheet, for our perusal.

The data show us a lot of insight into when wait times are highest and how different hospitals are performing. One of the things it allows us to do is calculate the average longest non-urgent wait time at a hospital’s ER over a length of time.

The longest non-urgent wait time is the longest a patient has been waiting with a non-urgent condition. People with urgent, life threatening conditions are seen much faster, regardless of wait times and queues.

The average longest non-urgent wait time for all WRHA ERs was 179 minutes, or nearly three hours. Here is a break down by hospital:

The WRHA’s goal is a longest possible wait time for a patient to be two to three hours. According to the data, Winnipeg ERs were missing this goal and going over three hours about 41 per cent of the time.

Here is a breakdown by hospital:

Here, we can see that the children’s section at the Health Sciences Centre met the three hour wait time goal nearly 88 per cent of the time, while St. Boniface Hospital met the goal 40 per cent of the time.

In general though, unless you’re a child there’s still a good chance you’ll be waiting for over three hours. So it makes sense to look at alternative health care centres like your family doctor or walk-in clinics for non-urgent ailments.

The WRHA provides a guide to seeking the right level of care here. Remember, for a serious or life threatening emergency, you’ll still be seen quickly at an emergency room regardless of wait times.

So what’s the best time to go to an ER? Well, average wait times for all patients waiting in the ER at any given point in time are general higher between midnight and 4 a.m., then hit a low around 8 a.m. and steadily increase through the day. Here’s a graph showing the average wait time for patients in an ER through a day: