Patients tell the inside story of Ontario's emergency rooms

People who have visited a hospital emergency room in Ontario recently are describing their experiences of lengthy waits for treatment or to get a bed. 

Their stories are part of the extraordinary trends seen in the province's hospitals over the past few months. Although spring is usually a time when the emergency departments are less backlogged, the latest statistics from Ontario Health show that wait times for ER patients to be admitted hitting all-time highs. 

As previously detailed in reporting by CBC News, the record-setting ER bottlenecks are being caused by a variety of factors outside the emergency rooms, including a crunch in getting patients admitted because hospital wards are operating at or above full capacity, staffing shortages from COVID-19 exposures and burnout, and limited access to family doctors. 

Dozens of patients and their family members reached out to CBC News to tell their emergency room stories. Here are a few of them.

When Mia Hutchinson took her daughter Téa to the emergency room at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto on a Wednesday night in June, the board in the waiting room indicated a wait time of three-and-a-half hours.

"So we thought maybe four, four and a half hours. We never thought it would be eight hours," said Hutchinson. 

"We sat in a hallway with three other families for about five hours, then moved to a room where we waited another three hours."

By the time the family made the decision to go to the emergency room, Téa had been running a fever of 39 to 40 degrees with a bad cough for four days, and had become dehydrated.

"We could not get the fever down. We called our family doctor and were not allowed to bring her in [to the doctor's office] because of her symptoms," said Hutchinson.

"When we call the doctor and are told because we are sick we can't come in, it makes no sense," she said. "Aren't doctors for the ill? Being refused to be seen caused us to go to the emergency room."

Hutchinson says she saw other children in the ER with high fever and cough, symptoms that she believes — like her daughter's — could have and should have been handled at a family doctor's office. 

Nancy Hunter says her husband Kevin received marvellous care from the staff on the cancer ward at Victoria Hospital in London, Ont., but his experiences in its emergency room were anything but ideal. 

After Kevin's diagnosis of lymphoma, cancer ward staff issued him a special card with instructions that while undergoing chemotherapy, he should get to the ER immediately if a fever develops. 

"They assured us that this 'fever card' would help the ER staff in identifying Kevin as a cancer patient," said Nancy. "The impression was we would be given priority. Our experience was completely the opposite: no priority given."