About ER Wait GTA
ER Wait GTA is a community-powered project that estimates current emergency-room wait times across the Greater Toronto Area. It blends three sources of data and shows the freshest credible estimate for each hospital.
What is wait time?
On this site, wait time means the estimated time from arrival at the emergency department (typically starts when you are triaged by a nurse or registered at check-in) to being seen by a physician or doctor. It does not include the total length of your visit or treatment time.
Data sources
- Patient reports — Anonymous or signed-in submissions from people who recently waited at an ER. Signed-in reports carry more weight in the blended estimate.
- Hospital websites — Where available, we check hospital websites every 30 minutes.
- Health Quality Ontario (Ontario Health) — Monthly average time-to-physician for each ER, used as a fallback when no real-time data is available.
- CIHI NACRS — Annual 90th-percentile ER length-of-stay published by the Canadian Institute for Health Information. Reported per hospital corporation (covering all sites in a system); shown alongside Ontario Health to give multi-year historical context. Different metric and cadence than Ontario Health, so the two are presented separately rather than blended.
How the blended estimate is chosen
We pick the freshest credible source: patient reports from the last 2 hours (when there are at least 3), otherwise a check of hospital websites from the last 60 minutes, otherwise the Ontario Health monthly baseline. Outlier reports (very long waits, very stale entries) are excluded.
Privacy
Anonymous reports never expose your identity. We store a salted hash of your IP + browser only to prevent spam; it's automatically purged after 24 hours. Signed-in reports show your Google display name and avatar. Patient reports are deleted after 90 days; only aggregated trends are retained. Geolocation is requested only when you tap "Find nearest" — never in the background.
Disclaimer
This is not medical advice. Wait estimates on this site can be inaccurate, stale, or missing entirely. They are not a substitute for clinical triage.
Emergencies: call 911. If you are experiencing chest pain, stroke symptoms, difficulty breathing, severe bleeding, or any other potentially life-threatening condition, call 911 or go to the nearest emergency department immediately.
ER Wait GTA, its operators, and its contributors accept no liability for decisions made on the basis of information shown on this site.
Corrections & contact
Spotted bad data or want a hospital added? Reach out through your hospital network or open an issue with the project maintainers.