Analysis: How Quebec's ER waits compare with those in England. Hint: terribly.

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In England, there is now growing outrage over the fact one in 10 patients must wait at least 12 hours after arriving in the “A&E,” the British term for an emergency room. This is being denounced as “appalling” by a North Cotswold politician. So how does this rate compare with Quebec’s?

First, in order to try to compare apples with apples, it’s worth noting the National Health Service (NHS) in England defines its ER length of time as patients who “spent more than 12 hours in an emergency care department from arrival to departure (admission, transfer or discharge).”

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Furthermore, for the NHS the length of stay in the ER is from “arrival time,” which is “the point that the patient is registered on the (Emergency Department) system and should be as close to the point of the patient crossing the threshold of the ED as possible.”

And the NHS defines departure as “when the patient’s clinical episode (in the ER) is finished, unless they are waiting for hospital arranged transport or social care/social service support.” OK, so how does this length of stay compare with Quebec’s?

Quebec doesn’t use the same methodology. But here are some figures for comparison: On the most recent date available, Feb. 12, nearly one in three ER patients spent at least 24 hours on a stretcher, according to the Quebec Health Ministry’s statistics dashboard. Not one in 10 over 12 hours like in England, but almost one in three over 24 hours. And that’s not the whole ER stay.

That is the average length of stay on a stretcher, which means patients in Quebec also wait for some time after they are registered in the system, but before they are ushered into the ER and examined by a physician. Quebec’s target for 24-hour lengths of stay on a stretcher is zero. Obviously, Quebec routinely falls far short of this objective.

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In fact, the average length of stay on a stretcher in a Quebec ER on Feb. 12 was nearly 18 hours. Quebec’s objective is less than 14 hours. By comparison in England, one in 10 patients spending more than 12 hours in the ER as their total length of stay is being denounced as “appalling.”

This is not to suggest people in England are overreacting to the wait times in their ERs. The United Kingdom has an ER crisis, too. Rather, this comparison raises the point that what should be denounced as intolerable in Quebec is somehow being tolerated by our politicians.

“These appalling delays are leaving often vulnerable and elderly patients in our area waiting for hours on end in overcrowded A&Es,” North Cotswold Parliamentary candidate Paul Hodgkinson was quoted as saying in Gloucestershire Live. Hodgkinson could well have been speaking about the situation in Quebec.

Meanwhile, on Saturday night, the occupancy rate in Montreal’s Royal Victoria Hospital was a staggering 200 per cent, and the average length of stay on a stretcher in corridors — without a shred of privacy — was 32 hours and 10 minutes. And somehow, this has come to be tolerated.

aderfel@postmedia.com

twitter.com/Aaron_Derfel

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