ER waits in Brampton hit 9.4 hours — the worst number in a bad provincial quarter
The latest provincial figures put Brampton's emergency waits at the top of the chart again, in a city still running one full-service hospital per 700,000 people.
The provincial quarterly data landed this week, and Brampton's line on the chart is where it usually is: on top. Median time to admission from the city's emergency departments hit 9.4 hours last quarter — the longest in the province, in a quarter when the provincial average itself got worse.
The number is a symptom; the arithmetic is the disease. Brampton has grown by roughly a city of Guelph since its last full-service hospital opened, and the beds-per-capita figure that results sits at a fraction of the provincial average. Every winter surge, every long weekend, every smog advisory lands on the same emergency departments, and the queue does what queues do.
The fix everyone agrees on — a second full-service hospital, with an expanded second phase already promised — moves at the speed of provincial capital planning, which is to say it is perpetually five to seven years away. City council has passed motions. The region has passed motions. The motions do not admit patients.
What the quarterly numbers offer is the one thing motions can't: a public scoreboard. The Bulletin will publish the ER figure every quarter it is released, in this space, without adjectives. The number is doing the arguing on its own.
