Anyone with a critical emergency should still call 911 or proceed to the nearest emergency room. But if the situation is less dire and you want to know how long the wait at any given emergency room will be, you can now just check on your computer or smartphone.
Alberta Health Services announced earlier this week that wait times for most of the hospitals through the Edmonton zone are now available online, both through its website at albertahealthservices.ca and as an app for Android and iPhone smartphones.
“This is to be open and transparent to the public on what wait times are in emergency rooms, to allow them to make a decision on where they’d like to go,” said St. Albert resident Carol Manson McLeod, who is executive director of emergency services for Edmonton zone.
The smartphone apps are available at iTunes for iPhones and Google Play for Android. The waiting times are refreshed by the system every two minutes to give as much of a real-time number as possible.
The system was first launched in Calgary and once AHS worked out most of the bugs, it rolled the system into the Edmonton zone at a cost of about $275,000.
“Because the infrastructure is already there and developed from Calgary, my understanding is that it’s not that expensive,” said McLeod.
Hospitals listed on the website and in the apps include the Sturgeon Community Hospital, as well as the University of Alberta, Misericordia, Royal Alexandra, Grey Nuns and Stollery hospitals, plus the Northeast Community Health Centre. Regional hospitals include the Leduc Community Hospital and Westview Health Centre in Stony Plain. The Fort Saskatchewan Hospital will also be added to the system once the software is installed.
On Friday, wait times at the Sturgeon varied from 19 minutes at 11 a.m. to nearly two hours at 1:15 p.m.
Manson McLeod said the goal of the program is to help even off wait times at other emergency rooms, called load-levelling. AHS hopes that when individuals see one hospital in particular is swamped, they will in turn go to another emergency room, thereby alleviating the burden on hospitals with the longest wait times.
“Obviously if patients go to emergency rooms with shorter wait times, that makes for shorter wait times at busier emergency rooms,” she said.
The system uses a complicated algorithm involving two benchmarks to determine the expected wait — the interval between when the emergency room triage nurse assesses a patient and when the doctor signs in to see them. Manson McLeod said the estimates have turned out to be fairly accurate.
“Before going live, we asked the nurses if the times look right. As a result of that we made a few changes but they said it looked pretty good.”
The program will also hopefully cut down on people calling hospitals like the Sturgeon and asking how long the wait is, Manson McLeod said.
“I’ve talked with the nursing staff at the Sturgeon and they say they often get phone calls asking how long the wait is. This provides that information without making the call and doesn’t take nurses away from their work.”
