For my data journalism piece, I was originally going to be doing a story on all the new red light cameras installed in Ottawa. Upon requesting the information, I could only be given the info for 2013 and 2014. I decided to change my subject to emergency room wait times in Ottawa in comparison to Ontario and Canada.
I was able to obtain the average hours it takes to see a doctor for an initial assessment. I was also about to obtain other info like doctors per capita, time to get a bed, funding information, demographics and more.
All around the country, hospitals have high emergency room wait times and Ottawa is no exception. The health district Ottawa belongs to, Champlain LHIN has higher wait times than the national and provincial average according to the Canadian institute for Health Information. Although the wait times in Ottawa have diminished slightly in the past years, the wait time is still surprisingly high.
The average wait time to see a doctor for an initial assessment in 3.1 hours in Canada, 3.0 in Ontario and 3.4 in Ottawa. Meaning that on average you would be waiting about 30 minutes longer to see a doctor than you would be elsewhere in the country.
Champlain LHIN includes just over one million people, 15 per cent of which are seniors and 20 per cent of which live in a rural area. The district includes all of Ottawa’s hospitals along with hospitals as far as in Renfew and Barry’s Bay.
If we look at Ottawa’s hospitals individually, they are still over the national average. The hospital with the lowest wait time in Ottawa is the Ottawa Hospital General Campus. Its initial wait time is 3.2 hours. The lonest wait time in Ottawa would be at the Montfort Hospital, where the average wait time is 6.4 hours.
What could be to blame for these long wait times aside from the lack of funding would be the lack of doctors. Ottawa only has 140 doctors per 100,000 people. This means, that for each doctor there are over 700 people. If we look at Toronto, they have 184 doctors per 100,000.
I was also able to obtain data from the government of Ontario on when wait times were worst in the year and in the week by time slot. This allowed me to pin point the times that were worst.
Overall I was able to find the best and worst times to be sick.
The best would be on a Sunday morning in June where you would visit the Ottawa Hospital General Campus. The worst scenario would be being sick on a Friday night in January and visiting Montfort hospital.
