{"id":586011,"date":"2026-04-06T14:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-06T14:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/586011\/"},"modified":"2026-04-06T14:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-06T14:40:08","slug":"exclusive-sante-quebec-drops-targets-for-reducing-er-overcrowding-from-medical-dashboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/586011\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec drops targets for reducing ER overcrowding from medical dashboard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec<\/a> took over the online medical dashboard from the provincial Health Ministry in mid-February, it has quietly stopped making public the government\u2019s objectives for reducing emergency-room overcrowding, The Gazette can reveal.<\/p>\n

The state corporation managing Quebec\u2019s health-care system has also reduced the number of ER indicators that the public used to be able to view on the online dashboard. Those changes come amid accusations by cardiac surgeons that Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec has been gaslighting the public<\/a> about wait times for heart operations, showing a dramatic decrease when the reality is far worse<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Power BI (database) we have access to is the same as before,\u201d a prominent ER physician told The Gazette. \u201cNothing has changed in that regard. It\u2019s what they are giving to the public that\u2019s less available, and I don\u2019t know where they\u2019re going with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ER doctor agreed to be interviewed on condition that their name not be published for fear of reprisals. \u201cIf you write an article, don\u2019t make me look not nice with Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec,\u201d the source said. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to mention (my name).\u201d<\/p>\n

When former health minister Christian Dub\u00e9<\/a> launched the dashboard in 2022, he emphasized the importance for the public \u2014 as well as for medical professionals and administrators \u2014 to be able to easily view a wide range of statistics about the performance of the network, including figures on ER overcrowding and wait times.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe made a very important decision \u2014 that even if the results are not great at the moment, it\u2019s better to be transparent,\u201d Dub\u00e9 said at the time, which was two years into the COVID-19 pandemic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\tER targets vanish from Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec dashboard\t<\/p>\n

Previously, below every ER indicator on the dashboard were targets the Health Ministry had set to improve the system. For example, the average stay last Nov. 3 on an ER stretcher across the province was 17 hours and 13 minutes. Below that length of time was the objective hospitals had to achieve months earlier \u2014 in fact, by March 31 last year: an average wait in that category of no more than 16 hours.<\/p>\n

\"ERA comparison between a 2025 ER chart that includes the government target to reduce the length of stay on a stretcher and the 2026 chart by Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec \u2014 with the target suddenly gone.<\/p>\n

Today, however, that objective is gone from that category on the Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec website. A horizontal red-dotted line used to run across the chart to show people when over the years the government objective was being met, and most of the time ERs fell far short of that goal. That line is also now missing, giving viewers little to no context that there is, in fact, an ER crisis that has persisted to this day.<\/p>\n

Indeed, at some overcrowded hospitals, like the Royal Victoria in Notre-Dame-de-Gr\u00e2ce, many ER patients are often not admitted to a bed in a ward, but linger for up to seven days on a stretcher in an ER corridor \u2014 deprived of privacy and at risk of falling.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, previously one had to click on just two links on the Health Ministry dashboard to view all the targets. Now, the process is more convoluted, requiring lots of website clicks and an awareness of how to navigate the Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec dashboard<\/a> to view those stats.<\/p>\n

Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec is moving fast. They want to be agile. They’re changing things, and I don’t think they’ve figured out everything. We cannot follow what they’re following.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u2014 ER source<\/p>\n

First, from the Health Ministry website, one must click on a link to Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s site. Once on it, one must know beforehand to click on the category titled Detailed Portrait (By Theme), among many different tabs. One then lands on another page and one must then click on the category of Urgence, or ERs, to view what is now a reduced array of stats.<\/p>\n

The ER source said they can\u2019t understand why the targets are suddenly gone from Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s dashboard, and acknowledged the public is not being properly informed. Without that information listed, Quebecers will have no idea whether Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec is, in fact, missing those targets, making the state corporation less accountable to taxpayers.<\/p>\n

Asked on Friday why Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec decided to drop the ER targets from its dashboard, spokesperson Genevi\u00e8ve Bettez referred a reporter to a web page with 20 indicators for the entire health-care system, not just ERs.<\/p>\n

And none of those indicators include the average length of an ER stay while on a stretcher \u2014 a phenomenon known as \u201challway medicine\u201d and denounced by emergency specialists as dangerous. The target of less than 16 hours is not on that page, either.<\/p>\n

Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec has also dropped a major category that used to appear on the Health Ministry dashboard: the provincewide percentage of ER stretchers occupied by patients for at least 24 hours. On Sept. 29 last year, for example, nearly 27 per cent of all the stretchers in ER hallways in Quebec were occupied for at least 24 hours by patients. The Health Ministry target for that category was zero per cent. All that information has disappeared from Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s dashboard today \u2014 including the target of zero per cent.<\/p>\n

One used to be able to view the ER performance of every hospital across the province for the previous week on the Health Ministry dashboard. Today, that information is not available on Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s dashboard. Instead, one must have the foreknowledge to return to the Health Ministry website for that information, and even then, the stats do not go back several days.<\/p>\n

A veteran nurse also confirmed to The Gazette that they, too, noticed a big difference between the more in-depth information the Health Ministry used to post on its dashboard about ERs and the fewer indicators Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec is now publishing. Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec became operational on Dec. 1, 2024, with the mandate<\/a> to run the system more efficiently.<\/p>\n

\t\tSant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec sets new ER target\t<\/p>\n

For 2027-28, Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec has set an ambitious target: to ensure that the average stay for an admitted patient in the ER is less than 19 hours and 30 minutes. But that target is not listed on Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s dashboard and is instead found on another web page.<\/p>\n

In the most recent period,\u00a0from Feb. 8 to March 7, the average stay of an admitted patient in Quebec\u2019s ERs was 24 hours and one minute \u2014 more than 4 1\/2 hours above Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s target for next year, underscoring the challenges hospitals face in accomplishing that goal in the coming months.<\/p>\n

Asked why less ER information is available on Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec\u2019s dashboard, Bettez claimed the opposite.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is worth noting that in February 2026, the (dashboard) was enhanced with the addition of detailed tabs organized by topic to provide a more granular view of the data,\u201d she said in an email.<\/p>\n

However, the ER source argued that is simply not true.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve definitely taken a lot of the ER stats away,\u201d the source said. \u201cSant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec is moving fast. They want to be agile. They\u2019re changing things, and I don\u2019t think they\u2019ve figured out everything. We cannot follow what they\u2019re following.\u201d<\/p>\n

aderfel@postmedia.com<\/a><\/p>\n

x.com\/Aaron_Derfel<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s Picks\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since Sant\u00e9 Qu\u00e9bec took over the online medical dashboard from the provincial Health Ministry in mid-February, it has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":586012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[49,48,84,392,218266,218268],"class_list":["post-586011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-montreal-hospitals","tag-quebec-health-care"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=586011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/586011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/586012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=586011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=586011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}