Transparency Grade: D-
Wait Times to Be Seen
What's the data showing?
Mean and maximum daily wait times to be seen at select Vancouver-area hospital emergency rooms.
Real-Time Waits for Some Sites
Estimated wait times to be seen are posted in many emergency rooms—useful once you get there (keeping in mind that patients are seen based on urgency). These wait time estimates for a number of Vancouver-area hospitals (and UPCCs) are fed into a website showing current emergency room wait times, which is a helpful tool for those needing to seek care at the time.
Sources
Partial Coverage Only
Wait time data for emergency rooms outside the Vancouver area is not available online. Patients have resorted to creating Facebook groups to share pictures of current area wait times.
In Apr/2025, Island Health announced it would be posting emergency room wait time estimates online. Piggy-backing on the existing edwaittimes.ca site used by VCH/FH? No, creating their own separate site. Because, like with health records and other information technology, every health authority in BC feels it has to do its own thing.
What Island Health eventually created was not a dashboard of live wait times, but a statistical amalgamation of the last eight weeks.
What's missing?
While real-time information is useful, historical or statistical information is not directly available. (The above charts were created by "scraping" data from the edwaittimes.ca site. Contact me if you'd like to obtain an archive of this data.)