The median waiting time in emergency rooms remained relatively stable from one year to the next, reaching 5 hours 13 minutes, indicates a report published Monday by the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI).
This represents an increase of two minutes compared to last year’s data. According to Emmanuelle B. Faubert, economist at the MEI and author of the report, although the situation is stable, that does not mean that it is acceptable.
“With the money we spend on health, all the projects we have, we would like to see an improvement,” declared M.me Faubert. And a two-minute increase is not what I call an improvement. Stagnation, in itself, is not a good thing and it shows that we need to change our ways of doing things to find better solutions to improve access to health care. »
Over a five-year period, the median length of emergency room stay in the province increased by 42 minutes. This data calculates the duration of time elapsed from the patient’s registration in the emergency room until their departure for home or hospitalization in another department.
The report highlights that there are large disparities between the regions of Quebec. Emergency visits with the longest median duration are in the Laurentides (7 hours and 18 minutes), Lanaudière (6 hours and 56 minutes) and Laval (6 hours and 53 minutes) regions.
In contrast, the best performing regions are Gaspésie (3 hours and 12 minutes), Bas-Saint-Laurent (3 hours and 17 minutes) and Côte-Nord (3 hours and 33 minutes).
The Anna-Laberge Hospital, in Montérégie, and the Royal Victoria Hospital, in Montreal, were particularly busy in 2023-2024, with respective median waiting times of 13 hours and 4 minutes and 10 hours and 27 minutes.
In other hospitals, the situation is quite different. In the emergency rooms of the Montmagny, Chauveau, Trois-Pistoles and Notre-Dame-du-Lac hospitals, the median wait is less than three hours.
The report also shows that 23.1% of stretcher patients spent more than 24 hours in the emergency room in 2023-2024, a decrease of 1.2% compared to last year’s data.
Mme Faubert argues that several politicians have promised in the past to resolve long stretcher wait times, but that these issues are still present today when one in five people spend more than 24 hours on a stretcher in the emergency room.
“It is also a capacity problem in the hospital system. Because, very often, people who are on stretchers are no longer in a state of emergency. They are treated, stabilized, but they cannot return home. They should be moved to another department, but due to a lack of beds, a lack of capacity, they are taken and they have to stay in the emergency room much longer than necessary,” explains M.me Faubert.
“It shows that there is a problem in the emergency room, but also in the rest of the hospital system. »
The solutions implemented in the health network must be innovative, underlines the economist. “We need to try new approaches rather than just injecting money as we have been doing for decades. We can see that it’s not working,” she said.
She adds that to prevent people from going to emergency rooms due to a lack of options, it is necessary to improve front-line care. According to Mme Faubert, certain current initiatives are a step in the right direction, notably the specialized nursing clinics which are established in the province.
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