The wait time for Winnipeg’s emergency rooms dropped by 27 minutes over the past year, but the average wait is still two hours longer than the national average.
A report released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) showed Winnipeg ranks dead last when it comes to both emergency room wait times as well as length of stay for admitted patients.
It takes 5.1 hours for most people to be seen by a doctor in one of Winnipeg’s emergency departments, down from 5.5 hours based on 2015/2016 data.
“(This reduction) is actually the biggest improvement reported by CIHI last year of any jurisdiction in Canada,” Lori Lamont, chief nursing officer for the WRHA, said.
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Nationally, there was no change over the past year in the average wait time, with initial assessments being provided in just over three hours.
The duration of stays in emergency departments increased across the country, with 90 per cent of emergency department patients at Winnipeg hospitals requiring admission being admitted in under 43.5 hours.
That’s 7.9 per cent longer than the previous year, but lower than the national increase of 11.3 per cent over the same time period.
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However, data from April to October of this year indicates that hospitals have improved their performance in both wait times and length of stay since the 2016/2017 season.
In particular, the time it takes for a person to be assessed dropped 14.5 per cent to 4.3 hours. The length of stay was also down by 29.5 per cent to 30.7 hours, which is below the Canadian average of 32.6 hours.
“We recognize we still have lots of work to do (with regards to length of stay), but again, our data from April 1 of this year until the end of October actually shows we’ve made tremendous improvement in that area, and we’re now down to just over 30 hours as the length of stay for 90 per cent of the admitted patients in the emergency, and that actually puts us below the Canadian average,” Lamont said.
“Something that we have set as a target was to achieve or beat the Canadian average and so far this year, things are looking very positive.”
All Winnipeg hospitals saw ER wait times reduced, with Victoria Hospital seeing the greatest decrease from 6 hours to 4.5 hours.
“We’re really very pleased by the continuing trend in improvement,” Lamont said, crediting a new computerized system used in WRHA hospitals with helping speed up administrative processes.
The WRHA has also improved their up-to-date wait time forecasts online, providing patients with more accurate estimates of how long they can expect to wait in the emergency room before seeing a doctor.
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