This newborn waited 8 hours for a doctor. Experts say Ontario’s ER wait times have never been worse

When Joey Salmingo took his newborn to an Ontario emergency room in late December, he didn’t expect him to wait eight hours to be seen by a doctor.

Salmingo says it took an hour for his son, who had a fever and was only two and a half weeks old at the time, just to be assessed by a triage nurse at a hospital north of Toronto on Dec. 30

“The biggest thing and most upsetting thing is the fact that this is just commonplace,” said Salmingo.

Salmingo says his son was discharged on Jan. 2 and is now healthy and at home.

But according Dr. Raghu Venugopal, an emergency physician who works in three Toronto hospitals, an eight-hour wait time “shatters any notion of what is acceptable medical care” in Canada.

He says a child with a fever could have sepsis — a serious condition in which the immune system has an extreme response to an infection — and should have been seen by a physician within 15 to 30 minutes.

Venugopal doesn’t blame emergency room staff, but says the worsening trend of chronically strained Ontario hospitals is making it nearly impossible to meet national Canadian health-care standards.

“We as a nation are failing children, women, seniors, regular patients with this kind of situation,” said Venugopal.

He says a lack of available emergency and non-emergency hospital beds, systemic staffing shortages, worsening vaccine uptake and respiratory hygiene in Ontario’s population and a shortage of primary care physicians are putting pressure on an already strained system.

Health Quality Ontario, a provincial agency that monitors health-care standards, shows a 2.1-hour average wait time across Ontario from the time a person checks in to an emergency room to when they are first assessed by a doctor or nurse.

‘Flow in is far bigger than the flow out’

According to the agency, figures from October 2023 show patients admitted to hospitals in Ontario spent nearly 22 hours hours on average waiting in a emergency room for an inpatient bed, and only 23 per cent of patients were admitted to hospital from the emergency department within the provincial target time of eight hours.

“The simple issue is that the flow in is far bigger than the flow out,” said Dr. Carolyn Snider, who represents the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.

Snider says emergency room…