You can check traffic at the bridges and U.S. border easily enough and plan accordingly.
Now you can find out what wait times are at five hospital emergency departments in Metro Vancouver, too.
Called the emergency department wait-times dashboard, it’s a new website developed by an ER doctor at St. Paul’s Hospital that lets patients check average wait times in real time at Vancouver General, Mount St. Joseph and St. Paul’s in Vancouver, Lions Gate in North Vancouver and Richmond hospital.
It’s a shared project between Vancouver Coastal Health and Providence Health Care.
“We originally developed the dashboard as a way for emergency department staff and paramedics to smooth out emergency department volumes and improve patient flow,” Dr. Eric Grafstein, regional head of emergency medicine for VCH and the site’s developer, said.
“Staff can see which emergency departments have capacity and then direct patients accordingly, which leads to a much more efficient use of hospital resources and a way to help relieve congestion.”
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According to VCH, three-quarters of all ER visits are walk-in patients.
“We’re excited to be able to take something initially developed for staff and use it to provide the public with valuable health-care information,” Grafstein said. “The dashboard allows patients with non-critical illnesses to choose where and when to receive treatment based on the shortest average wait time to see a doctor.”
Average wait times are calculated for all patients who aren’t critically ill who arrive at each hospital and the dashboard is updated every five minutes.
Two sets of numbers are given: The average wait time for the past hour and the average wait time of nine of the last 10 patients seen.
“In general, your wait time will be in a range between those two numbers,” Grafstein said.
At 11:30 a.m. on Monday, for instance, Mount St. Joseph had the shortest wait to see a doctor with a range of 18 to 23 minutes; Lions Gate had the longest delay getting seen by a doctor, from 1½ hours to 2:07.
By 3 p.m., on the other hand, St. Paul’s was the quickest (25 to 55 minutes), while Vancouver General was longest (1:19 to 1:53).
Grafstein got the idea about 10 years ago, he said, when his dad called from Las Vegas in tears because he had such pain in his leg and had been waiting for hours to see a doctor.
“I thought, ‘This is ridiculous, why is he having this long of a wait?’”
The system was designed so it can be expanded to include other B.C. health authorities, although the funding isn’t available at the moment, Grafstein said.
The dashboard’s web address is http://www.edwaittimes.ca. It can also be accessed via the VCH and PHC websites (vch.ca; providencehealthcare.org). The website is also available through smartphones.
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