When B.C.’s health minister promised online wait times for Vancouver Island hospitals earlier this spring, the reaction from many was: finally.
Being able to check ER waits remotely has long been possible at hospitals in Vancouver Coastal and Fraser Health authorities. And it’s become a necessity for people as they try to navigate the backlogged health-care system, where it can easily take more than 12 hours to be seen in an emergency department. But almost right after it launched on July 3, people started to notice the online times didn’t match up with the real-world reality.
The Victoria General Hospital wait was listed at three hours and 15 minutes on July 15, but was really five and a half hours when one person arrived, according to a Facebook page tracking ER wait times.
A Victoria mother whose teenaged son had a deep gash in his leg from jumping on a trampoline, saw a 12-hour wait time for Royal Jubilee Hospital’s ER on the new website, only to arrive and find the ER empty, according to the Times Colonist.
Turns out, Island Health’s new online wait system doesn’t actually list wait times. Health officials, pressed to explain, admitted the website actually takes an average of that particular hour, on that same day, over the past eight weeks. And then it updates that figure only once per day.
To many, these figures are useless. Island Health insists they are still accurate in the sense people can expect to be seen earlier than the listed wait times 90 per cent of the time.
The not-so-accurate times could be detrimental to people who see them, think they are true, and then drive further away to other hospitals when in crisis, the mother of the teen boy with the leg gash told the TC.
Others suggest the quasi-fictional times might even deter people from coming to the ER at all.
“How can people trust that time?” Rosanna Carbone, who runs the Greater Victoria ER Facebook page told CHEK News.
“It’s like they threw this together to just give us something. It’s pointless,” Carbone added to the TC. Over on the mainland, Vancouver Coastal Health has been putting ER wait times online, in real-time, for almost 10 years.
Those numbers are updated using predictive algorithms that take into account the number of patients and the seriousness of their cases. The data refreshes every five minutes. And it includes Urgent and Primary Care Centres.
Fraser Health, Providence Health, BC Children’s Hospital and the Provincial Health Services Authority are all partners in that system.
You might be wondering why Island Health can’t just do the same. It turns out, the authority went a different way in procuring electronic health software, ending up with a system that’s incompatible with what the Lower Mainland hospitals do. Even partnering with them to take advantage of the work they’ve already done appears out of the question.
Health authorities pursuing divergent IT systems has long been a problem for British Columbia. All the different presidents and vice-presidents of the health authorities have justified their executive-level salaries by charging off to reinvent the technological wheel again and again.
Northern Health and Interior Health, meanwhile, don’t have any online ER wait times listed at all.
The inability of B.C.’s six health authorities to offer consistent service is the kind of thing you’d hope the BC NDP government is taking a look at as part of its efficiency reviews.
Premier David Eby has pointed to the proliferation of administrators and managers as one area the government can find savings in health authorities.
Maybe another could be technology. One system. One website with hospital wait times. Updated in real time.
Surely that’s not asking too much, to help people navigate a health-care system that’s already stretched to the limit.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 17 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for The Orca/BIV. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
🚨New newsletter alert! Stay ahead of the curve in B.C. politics. Get expert political analysis delivered straight to your inbox, plus inside scoops and other stories from across the province. Sign up here for the Capital & Coast newsletter.
