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Just weeks before Health Minister Sylvia Jones said the province’s health-care system was not in crisis, patients visiting Ontario emergency departments were waiting an average of 20.7 hours before they were admitted — more than two-and-a-half times the provincial target of eight hours.

New data released by Ontario Health last week shows that in July, the average amount of time patients spent in emergency departments rose to levels that one emergency room physician called “inhumane.”

High-urgency patients who were not admitted stayed an average of 4.7 hours, which is tied with the month of May for the highest length of stay in the last year. At the same time, patients awaiting just a first assessment by an emergency department doctor waited an average of 2.1 hours, continuing a high established in May.

This despite assurances from Jones a week after this data was collected that the health system is not in crisis.

“We have a very strong health-care system in Ontario,” Jones said Aug. 8. “It disturbs me, as I’m sure it does many, when (Ontarians) find that their local hospital has to close for four hours, a shift, a period of time, but to suggest that it is in crisis is completely inappropriate.”

For those on the front lines, such an assessment couldn’t be further from the truth.

“I have never seen anything this bad. Never,” said Dr. Alan Drummond, an emergency physician in Perth and co-chair of public affairs for the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. “Sylvia Jones has said there is no crisis … She is living in an alternate universe.”

Drummond noted that because the times are presented as averages, they don’t tell the full story about what patients experience. “For the person that waited 21 hours, some waited 12, some waited 48 … It’s inhumane and unconscionable.”

The new data is more evidence of the intense pressures facing Ontario’s health-care system, which include emergency department closures across the province in recent weeks, an increase in alternate-level-of-care patients in hospital hallways and ambulance offload delays, in addition to attrition in the nursing profession.

Drummond warned that wait times and lengths of stay are expected to get even worse this fall thanks to increasing patient volume, insufficient nursing staff to deal with the current volume and potential waves of COVID and influenza.

In an email, Ministry of Health spokesperson Bill Campbell said the government’s new road map to fix the health-care system “Our Plan to Stay Open,” unveiled last month, will make sure Ontarians “continue to have access to the care they need when they need it.”

“Once fully implemented, the next phase of the Plan to Stay Open will add up to 6,000 more health-care workers, including nurses and personal support workers, to Ontario’s health workforce, will free up over 2,500 hospital beds so that care is there for those who need it, and will expand models of care that provide better, more appropriate care to avoid unnecessary visits to emergency departments,” Campbell said.

He said the province has already added over 3,500 new critical care, acute and post-acute hospital beds and over 10,700 health-care workers.

“We know many other provinces across the country are facing the same pressures we’re facing here in Ontario and that more work needs to be done,” said Campbell.

Drummond noted that long wait times in Ontario emergency departments are nothing new and have been a problem under successive provincial governments. He said long wait times are not a function of too many people coming to the emergency department, or an inappropriate use of emergency services by people who could be seen in an alternate setting, such as a walk-in clinic. Rather, he said the true cause of long wait times is the fact that bed occupancy in most Ontario hospitals is at or near capacity.

“When you have a crowded hospital, you can’t transfer a patient from the emergency department to the ward,” Drummond said. “Therefore they spend an extended amount of time occupying an emergency stretcher as an admitted patient for hours or even days on end.

“When you have patients waiting in the emergency department, that means patients in the waiting room can’t be seen.”

None of this surprises Ron Prickett.

The 75-year-old from Sault Ste. Marie broke his femur on July 11 after falling off his bike in Sauble Beach, west of Owen Sound. An ambulance took him to Wiarton Hospital, where he says he was placed in what he described as a partition in a renovated hallway beneath a fluorescent light that could not be turned off. He says he lay there for four days while waiting for treatment, which was not provided, apart from painkillers.

“They said they were full and that there was no room,” Prickett told the Star. “To me, if they have no room for one person who has broken their femur, what kind of system do we have?”

Prickett says that after four days of lying in excruciating pain, a veteran nurse made a call and got him in for surgery at London Health Sciences Centre, more than 200 kilometres away.

“The system really needs shaking up from top to bottom. Something’s wrong when a guy like me who has an emergency can’t be dealt with,” Prickett said.

Mary Margaret Crapper, a spokesperson for Grey Bruce Health Services, said the surgical procedure required by Prickett was not done by surgeons practising at any of the region’s six hospitals and that any patient requiring this level of surgery must be transferred to another facility outside the area.

“Many hospitals, like our own facilities, are at capacity, and are experiencing staffing shortages. Finding a bed where a patient can get the required service, can, unfortunately, take time, as in this case,” Crapper said. “Patient safety is our priority, and those who are waiting in our care for transfer to another facility are closely monitored. We recognize this wait can be stressful for patients, and for families.”

When asked why Prickett was placed in an area without light switches, Crapper said the hospital had to make some modifications for new infection protocols during COVID that involved converting one large emergency department room into two temporary rooms.

“Separate electrical switches for each room are part of our permanent renovation plan for this department,” she said.

Editor’s note — Sept. 12: This story has been updated.

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