About ER Wait GTHA
ER Wait GTHA is a community-powered project that estimates current emergency-room wait times across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton 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. Note that some hospitals publicly report their average ER wait time, while others report the wait time experienced for most patients (8 out of 10) patients, while others do not define the metric they're publishing.
- 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. Signed-in reports show your Google display name and avatar. Geolocation is requested only when you tap "Find nearest" — never in the background. See our privacy notice for the full picture.
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 GTHA, its operators, and its contributors accept no liability for decisions made on the basis of information shown on this site.
Created by
ER Wait GTHA was built by Nova Syed. Connect with her on Substack or on LinkedIn.