Emergency department patients at Southlake Regional Health Centre are being seen by a doctor faster than at other hospitals in Ontario, a provincial report found.
The average wait time for all patients to be first assessed by a doctor in emergency at Southlake was 0.6 hours in April 2022, a recent report from Health Quality Ontario found. This is the lowest in the province, tied with William Osler Health System - Peel Memorial Centre.
"We’re proud to be recognized as having the lowest average emergency wait times to be seen at 0.6hr across the province. This wouldn’t be possible without the dedicated team of staff and physicians @SouthlakeRHC working together to serve our patients’ needs," tweeted Arden Krystal, hospital CEO.
A new patient comes to the emergency department at Southlake every 4.5 minutes and the number of annual visits increased almost 96 per cent from 57,000 in 2003 to 112,000 visits in 2019 and 2020.
Despite that, Southlake's wait time is well below the Ontario average of 1.9 hours.
All of York Region's hospital were below that time. At Mackenzie Richmond Hill it was 0.7 hours, at Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital it was one hour, at Markham Stouffville Hospital it was 1.1 hours.
The longest wait time in the province was at Windsor Regional Hospital's Metropolitan Campus, where patients on average wait for five hours in the emergency room to be seen by a doctor.
The report also looked at the total length of stay in emergency departments for each hospital.
At Southlake, it found that on average the length of stay in emergency for low-urgency patients not admitted to hospital was 2.1 hours. Eighty-nine per cent of patients finished their visit within the target time of four hours.
For high-urgency patients not admitted to hospital, the average length of stay in hospital was 3.4 hours and 96 per cent of patients finished their visit within the target time of eight hours.
However the wait was longer for patients in emergency who were admitted to the hospital. At Southalke the average wait time for these patients was 20.6 hours, which includes time spent waiting for a bed to become available. Only 19 per cent of patients in emergency were admitted within the target time of eight hours.
The hospital has also had to find creative solutions to deal with crowding, which has involved moving the nurse's station into the hallway, stable patients returning to the waiting area after initially being assessed, and stretcher spaces in the hallways.
Southlake has plans to build a new hospital with a 90 per cent increase in spaces to address crowding and keep up with population growth.
