I'm only 41 so I cant offer as complete a timeline as some of our more ahem "experienced"
posters.
But as far as emergency room waits I can remember in high school going to the emergency room meant a four hour wait for sure...
There has been a bit of a stink going on in Ontario about wait times lately so the "health minister" has been publishing some figures lately:
- "90 per cent of patients who need to be admitted are checked into a bed in 27.9 hours or less".... their own published target is 12.2 hrs. Yay! Only 28 hrs to get admitted to a bed for acute care. AND don't overlook the fact that this is only 90%- one in ten poor bastard that is looking at some indeterminate amount of time to get that bed. 2 days-3 days? on a chair or the floor of the emergency room...?
-"In 2009, Canada had 1.7 acute-care beds for every 1,000 Canadians, putting it second last in a ranking of 34 OECD countries. The OECD average is 3.4 beds per 1,000."
Yay again! We are doing great there. I'm not exactly sure who we beat but china, india, indonisia, malaysia are all OECD countries- so all of them are kicking our ass but 1....
That's what my 5 minute google search turned up regarding emergency wait times anyways... which closely matches with my own first hand experience. I don't believe for a minute that real world wait times are anything close to what the .GOV publishes... You KNOW that those statistics are massaged very-very hard by about 5 levels of bureaucracy before they are released to the unwashed masses like me.
