Ontario hospital emergency rooms report record-high wait times

Patients in emergency rooms around Ontario are waiting record lengths of time to get admitted to hospital, a situation medical professionals say only appears to be getting worse. 

The trend is particularly worrisome for hospitals because it's happening despite a diminishing COVID-19 caseload, and because it comes at a time of year when the burden on emergency departments usually eases. 

More than two years into the pandemic, the wait times are a sign of just how chronically strained the province's hospitals have become. 

"Our emergency departments are under more stress than I've ever seen in my career," said Dr. Howard Ovens, who has worked in the ER at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital for nearly 40 years and chairs the province's emergency services advisory committee. 

Have you or someone close to you recently endured a long stay in an emergency room in Ontario? Email CBC News to tell us about your experience. 

"The workload related to the patients that we are seeing is at a record high," said Ovens in an interview. 

Key factors driving the long wait times are largely spin-off effects of the pandemic: 

This comes on top of long-standing issues in the system that extend well beyond the doors of the emergency room, including discharge bottlenecks caused by a shortage of long-term care spaces and home-care support. 

Underpinning the rising emergency department wait times are problems that existed in Ontario's health-care system long before COVID-19 came along, and never really went away: hospitals so routinely stretched beyond their capacity that caring for patients in hallways became the norm.

Mix it all in with what officials say are record-high numbers of patients being brought in by ambulance and record-high numbers of ER patients requiring admission, and it's resulting in emergency room wait times that have never been seen before at this time of year. 

The latest statistics published by Ontario Health show that patients who came to an ER in April and were admitted to hospital spent on average 20 hours in the emergency department before getting a bed in a ward. 

That figure is the longest wait time Ontario has ever posted in April. It's 42 per cent higher than it was in April 2021, and only a fraction off the record-high 20.1 hours average wait time seen at the peak of the Omicron wave in January. 

While more recent wait time statistics are not publicly available, administrators and medical professionals with direct knowledge of the system say the situation in emergency rooms has not improved since April. 

"The emergency departments are on fire," said Amie Archibald-Varley, a registered nurse who works in the ER of a large hospital in the Greater Toronto Area.