Quebec is the worst province for emergency room wait times: MEI study
- The Montreal Economic Institute's 2024 report reveals that Quebec experienced the highest median emergency room wait duration in Canada, with patients waiting an average of 5 hours and 23 minutes.
- The report attributes these long waits to rising delays across Canada and structural weaknesses in Quebec's healthcare system revealed and worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Some Quebec regions reported median wait times exceeding eight hours, with Montreal’s Pavillon Albert-Prévost mental health ER averaging over 13 hours; by contrast, Alberta’s median was 3 hours and 48 minutes.
- Emmanuelle Faubert, the report's author, emphasized that extended wait times affect actual people in Canada who experience postponed urgent medical treatment, leading to unnecessary suffering and discomfort.
- The report calls for prompt changes, including the implementation of combined public and private urgent care models and the expansion of specialized nurse practitioner clinics, to help shorten emergency room wait times in Quebec.
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The time patients spend in the emergency before they see a health care professional is always as long, according to a final report.
Quebec is the worst province for emergency room wait times: study
Quebec has the longest emergency room wait times, confirms a new MEI study that has compared emergency room wait times across Canadian provinces since 2020. “The overall trend is that wait times are increasing across the country, and our healthcare systems are disintegrating,” said Emmanuelle B. Faubert, an economist at the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) […]
The province comes to the last place, far behind the others with a median time of 5 hours and 23 minutes.
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