‘Undignified’: New data shows Ontario hospital wait times growing worse

The Ford government is facing new questions about the state of Ontario’s health-care system after a leaked report shows emergency room wait times are worsening, leaving more people being treated in the hallways of provincial hospitals.

The leaked Ontario Health report called “access to care” was prepared in October for the provincial health-care bureaucracy and provided a snapshot into emergency departments and ambulance bays during the month of August.

The report was leaked to the Ontario Liberal Party which publicized the document in full.

The report shows the backlogs begin even before a patient steps foot into an Ontario hospital.

In August, the majority of patients who were transported to a hospital in an ambulance were forced to wait up to 83 minutes to be offloaded and taken inside the emergency room. This, the report says, is a 40.7 per cent increase from the same time period in 2021.

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Once offloaded, the report indicates, the experience of Ontario patients doesn’t seem to improve.

After the initial assessment with a triage nurse, the majority of patients spent up to 44.1 hours in the emergency department waiting to be admitted to hospital — a 48.2 per cent increase from August 2021.

Once a physician decided to admit a patient in hospital, a majority of patients spent up to 33.4 hours in August waiting to actually be transferred to an available hospital bed, which the report indicates is a 54.3 per cent increase from the same period last year.

The result is a log-jam of people waiting to be treated in Ontario’s 160 emergency departments potentially contributing to the overwhelming demand on front-line nurses and physicians.

The report found that at 8 a.m. every day during the month of August, an average of 883 people were in an emergency department “waiting for a hospital bed,” which represents a 53 per cent increase from the summer of 2021.

Hospitals in Toronto, Hamilton and Mississauga were among the top five most impacted emergency departments.

Dr. Adil Shamji, an ER physician who was recently elected as a Liberal MPP, said overwhelmed hospitals could lead to lower standards of care and a higher degree of error when caring for patients

“It forces (staff) to move faster, to not necessarily deliver the full scope of care that (they) would like to under normal circumstances, potentially even to cut corners and it increases the probability that (they) would make mistakes,” Shamji told reporters at Queen’s Park.

“It’s dangerous. It’s undignified. It’s not right.”

Global News asked for an interview with the CEO of Ontario Health and the minister of health, but has yet to receive a response from Ontario Health.

A spokesperson for the Minister of Health said she was not available for an interview.

“Our government is not okay with the status quo,” the spokesperson said. “That’s why we have introduced our Plan to Stay Open and passed the More Beds, Better Care Act which together will bring over 6,000 new health care workers into Ontario’s work force, free up over 2,500 hospital beds and expand models of care to avoid unnecessary visits to emergency departments.”