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<\/p>\nA memo sent to staff has revealed longstanding flaws in the system that estimates wait times at Winnipeg emergency departments, which sometimes causes the projections to be lower than the actual wait times.<\/p>\n
The memo, obtained by the Free Press, shows officials from Shared Health and the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority reached out to staff in February to warn them wait time estimates were sometimes found to be \u201cquite inaccurate.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAs many of you know, the publicly facing waiting times boards are not always reflective of the actual number of patients in the department, nor have they always given wait times that prepare our patients for the wait that they will experience,\u201d the memo said.<\/p>\n
The regional health authority publishes estimated wait times for emergency departments and urgent-care centres online, and updates the figures throughout the day. The data includes the number of people waiting or being treated at each facility.<\/p>\n
The memo warned inaccurate estimates can, in some cases, lead to \u201csafety events\u201d in which patients choose to leave one facility to be triaged at another because they expect a shorter wait. To combat that, health officials removed wait time displays from waiting rooms.<\/p>\n
Health officials have spent months working with the vendor behind the estimates to improve accuracy. The memo said the vendor\u2019s system used old data that \u201cno longer represent the reality in 2025-2026\u201d to predict wait times. A multi-year data set was recently updated to the end of 2024 to make the boards more accurate.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe hope this will reduce the number of frustrating encounters based on misleading information,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said physicians flagged the inaccurate estimates last summer.<\/p>\n
The health minister said data used to formulate wait time estimates were inadvertently \u201ccapped\u201d \u2014 meaning patient numbers could only go up to a given figure, regardless of how many people were actually in an emergency department.<\/p>\n
The memo notes this cap, which was active during late evenings and nights, has been removed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was a historical practice \u2014 we\u2019re talking eight, 10 years old \u2014 and that approach had never been changed,\u201d Asagwara said, adding the work started immediately to fix the issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know it\u2019s really, really important for Manitobans to have accurate information when they\u2019re looking at wait times\u2026 You should be able to trust that information is accurate so you make the best decision for your family.\u201d<\/p>\n
Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson was not surprised to learn about the problem.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have believed for a very long time that there has been an error in these dashboards,\u201d Jackson said, adding she frequently fields complaints about inaccurate wait times.<\/p>\n
She said misleading information can frustrate patients and cause them to lash out at nurses and other care providers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe front-line staff seem to be the people that get the brunt of that frustration from patients that are waiting, waiting, waiting for hours.\u201d<\/p>\n
Transparency and accuracy are critical to ensuring a safe and efficient health system, she said.<\/p>\n
Dr. Stephenson Strobel, a health economist and emergency physician who has researched the impact of displaying wait time estimates in some Ontario facilities, described such estimates as a \u201cdouble-edged sword.\u201d<\/p>\n
High wait times can sometime dissuade less acute patients from heading to the emergency room, encouraging them to seek treatment elsewhere and reducing overcrowding. However, if projected wait times become too high, even very sick patients may choose not to seek care, he said.<\/p>\n
In some cases, there are administrative reasons to place caps on the number of patients that can be accounted for in wait time-prediction models \u2014 in part, to strike a balance between those two scenarios. Often, these caps lead to wait time estimates that are lower than reality, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think providing accurate information to patients and allowing them to make decisions for themselves is probably better than not providing them information and letting them make decisions for themselves,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Doctors Manitoba, which speaks for physicians in the province, said the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoctors strive for accuracy in everything they do, and they would expect the information the health system shares with patients to be held to the same standard,\u201d a spokesperson said in a statement.<\/p>\n
A person familiar with Manitoba\u2019s tracking system, who spoke on background because they were not authorized to discuss the subject, said accurate wait times are difficult to nail down.<\/p>\n
The province shifted from an in-house model that showed current wait times in each facility to a prediction model run by a private company around 2016 or 2017, he said.<\/p>\n
Both methods have shortcomings, but the prediction model is \u201cmore of a weather forecast for what\u2019s to come, rather than just telling you what the temperature is right now,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201dPrediction has become more challenging for two reasons. First, the pandemic led to major disruptions in how patients accessed care. You can see wait times improved during the early pandemic. Then, as the system recovered, wait times grew and are now consistently much longer than they were before the pandemic,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese changing factors make a prediction model less reliable when the history it draw on no longer repeats itself.\u201d<\/p>\n
tyler.searle@freepress.mb.ca<\/p>\n
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Tyler Searle Tyler Searle is a multimedia producer who writes for the Free Press\u2019s city desk. A graduate of Red River College Polytechnic\u2019s creative communications program, he wrote for the Stonewall Teulon Tribune, Selkirk Record and Express Weekly News before joining the paper in 2022.\u00a0Read more about Tyler<\/a>.<\/p>\n Every piece of reporting Tyler produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print \u2014 part of the Free Press\u2018s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press\u2019s history and mandate<\/a>, and learn how our newsroom operates<\/a>.<\/p>\n Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber<\/a>.<\/p>\n Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.<\/p>\n \t\t
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