Paying a visit to the emergency room is always a gamble. Depending on where you go, you may face long wait-times.
Now, Alberta Health Services (AHS) is taking the guess-work out of how long that wait could be.
On Wednesday, Alberta became the first province in Canada to post ER wait-times online, posting estimated wait times for six hospitals and urgent care centres in Calgary. That day alone, the site generated 6,000 visitor hits between 10 a.m. and midnight.
Knowing which hospitals have longer wait-times before you leave the house is something new mom Kara Brandson would like to see in Manitoba.
"It would be better to know for sure, especially with a little one because with them, you can't really tell what's wrong," she said.
The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA) has gone as far as installing a board in the emergency room at Seven Oaks General Hospital. It lists an approximate wait-time to see a doctor.
The emergency room wait-time board has been up and running at Seven Oaks for more than a year now. The plan is to roll it out next at Concordia Hospital, followed by Victoria General Hospital, then the Grace Hospital, but the WRHA said so far there's no plan to introduce an online system similar to Calgary's.
"We are going to be following Calgary's pilot project and see how it works and what their feed-back is and that's something we will definitely take into consideration," said Heidi Graham of the WRHA.
The pilot project in Alberta is part of a 5-year plan to reduce wait-times.
"So far we're getting incredibly good feedback about it," said Dr. Cheri Nijssen-Jordan, senior medical lead with the AHS. "I think that's a pretty good sign that we've got most of the information on there that people want to see."
Alberta officials said that 75 per cent of the time the information is accurate to within one hour of the posted wait time.
Patients will still be triaged depending on the severity of the case, which is the same system the wait boards in Winnipeg use. That means even if it says a two hour wait, it could be longer if more serious cases show up.
-- with a report by CTV's Karen Rocznik
