Estimated wait times at Winnipeg emergency departments 'quite inaccurate' at times: memo

The system behind the emergency department wait times Winnipeggers see online had multiple flaws that made waits sometimes appear lower than they should, an internal memo shows.

The memo sent out in early February by Shared Health and Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA) leadership says the information was "quite inaccurate" at times, and that officials had spent months working with the vendor to correct the public boards.

"As many of you know, the publicly facing waiting times boards are not always reflective of the actual number of patients," the memo began. "Nor have they always given wait times that prepare our patients for the wait that they will experience."

WRHA posts estimated wait times for emergency departments and urgent care centres on its website, which are updated throughout the day. The boards also include the number of people waiting or being treated at given hospitals.

The February memo said the boards — which were also displayed in waiting rooms — used old data that "no longer represent the reality in 2025-2026" to predict wait times, and that the multi-year dataset had been recently updated to the end of 2024 to make the boards more accurate.

It also said code that resulted in an "unexplained" cap in patients displayed at certain times of the day had been removed.

The code meant that at some points during late evenings and nights, the patient numbers could only go up to a given figure regardless of how many people were actually in an emergency department, the memo said.

The officials said they were aware showing the numbers on internal waiting room displays may have resulted in "safety events" where people chose to leave an emergency department because they saw wait times were lower at another hospital, even though they had already been triaged.

"As a result, we have removed that information from the internal waiting room displays," the memo said.

The memo said the system’s predictive model also suffered on days when outlier patients experienced very long wait times.

"We know that this has been occurring with unprecedented frequency and so we are working on shaping the predictions so that they're more likely to capture that experience," the memo said, adding that it will continue to monitor the changes.

Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson said the information in the memo was not surprising.

"I hear from patients all the time.… They're told there's a four-hour wait, and they'll sometimes wait up to 10 hours, 15 hours," Jackson said.

A provincial spokesperson said the predictive model showed wait times that may be lower or higher than the time displayed on the emergency department, but did not specify whether it was intended to predict typical waits.