Island Health says it’s “not able to constantly upload data to inform a ‘real time’ prediction,” uploading the data “once per day.”
The instant a Victoria mother heard her teenage son was being rushed to Royal Jubilee Hospital for a deep gash in his leg, she looked up the health authority’s new ER wait-time website.
It was about 10 p.m. on a Friday night, and the mom was camping with her husband in Nanaimo.
The teen had called his mom en route after friends put him in the back of a car and drove him to Royal Jubilee.
When she looked up the posted wait times, Royal Jubilee’s ER was a daunting 12 hours, Victoria General’s was about nine hours, and Nanaimo Regional General Hospital’s was about one hour.
In the end, the teen, who had been injured while doing a back flip on a trampoline, was seen immediately at Royal Jubilee — not just because a piece of flesh was ripped out to his shin bone, but because the ER was empty.
It was so empty, in fact, that staff said he was the only interesting case all night.
“He was in, had X-rays, and got sewn up and was home two and a half hours later,” said his mother, who did not want her name used because she works in health care.
The physician even called her pre-treatment because her son is a minor.
The teen said that because the hospital was so close and his injury was so significant, he would have gone to the ER regardless of the posted wait time just to check it out. “I was like, well, if there’s that big of a chunk missing in my leg, I’m thinking I was going to get in pretty quick.”
His mother was also confident that her son would have been seen immediately as an urgent case.
But she saidIsland Health’s wait-time websitewas not only inaccurate, it could have been detrimental to her son’s care had he opted to be driven to Nanaimo’s hospital for the shorter wait.
Marko Peljhan, Island Health’s vice-president for acute clinical operations, said anyone experiencing a medical emergency should call 911 or go to the ER without hesitation, regardless of the posted wait time.
Inannouncing the launch of the ER wait-time website, Peljhan said Island Health sought the “most accurate possible” methodology.
But in a statement to theTimes Colonist, the health authority acknowledged it’s “not able to constantly upload data to inform a ‘real time’ prediction.”
The estimated wait times are calculated at each site using ER data from the same day and hour over the previous eight weeks, yielding an approximate time within which nine out of 10 patients will be seen.
It’s the same calculation that’s been used to estimate wait times on screens inside Island Health ERs since January 2025.
The health authority said data is only uploaded to its system “once per day.”
That contrasts with “real-time” wait data provided by ERs in the Vancouver Coastal Health system, for example, even though both health authorities are on Cerner systems. Now known as Oracle Health, Cerner is a U.S.-based, multinational provider of health information technology platforms and services.
Vancouver Coast Health’s emergency department wait times dashboardwas first launched in 2013 as a partnership between the health authority and Providence Health Care, and allows patients to check online for current wait times at emergency departments and Urgent and Primary Care Centres across the region.
The website was updated last year to help improve the “user experience” and accuracy of posted wait times. Vancouver Coastal Health said. The site is updated every five minutes and uses real-time patient data and a predictive model to generate estimated wait times, according to the health authority.
Posted wait times are calculated using everything from the current number of patients receiving care to the volume and seriousness of arriving patient cases, since it may take longer to care for sicker people.
A recent internal audit of the website determined that posted wait times are accurate to within 30 minutes of actual wait times more than 90 per cent of the time, said Vancouver Coastal Health public affairs officer Jeremy Deutsch in an email.
Wait times posted on Monday morning were one to three hours for ERs at three of Vancouver’s major hospitals: Vancouver General Hospital, B.C. Children’s Hospital and St. Paul’s Hospital. At the same time, Greater Victoria’s hospitals’ ERs were posting three-and-a-half to over eight-hour waits.
Island Health said that it does not have the same Cerner system or analytical systems as the health authorities on the Lower Mainland, and is “exploring additional opportunities” for emergency department wait-time data to be updated more frequently.
Last April, tired of waiting for an official ER wait-time website for Island hospitals, Rosanna Carbone created a Facebook page calledVictoria Emergency Room Updatesthat allowed patients visiting the ER to share their wait times.
Carbone was disappointed when Island Health announced its long-anticipated online system on July 3, only to reveal it was based on eight weeks of data rather than real-time estimates.
She plans to leave her Facebook page up so people can continue to share their real-time wait information.
“I’m not impressed at all with Island Health,” said Carbone, noting other health authorities have had online ER estimates for some time. “It’s like they threw this together to just give us something. It’s pointless.”
Island Health, however, argues that the predictive modelling of the real-time ER wait-time estimate — the one used by Vancouver Coastal — is just slightly better than the eight-week look back in estimating wait times.
There’s about “a two per cent difference between the average performance of the two models,” said the health authority, adding that it is closely monitoring the experience of patients and medical staff and will tweak the model as needed.
The health authority said the data gathered from the website thus far shows tens of thousands of visits. The site also shows other care options and contact information, such as for poison control, pharmacy services, mental health and substance use help, sexual assault care in the ER, the Health Connect registry, and the 8-1-1 for non-emergency health advice.
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