Here are the local hospitals with the longest emergency room wait times

Wait times at local hospitals top provincial average CTV’s Carmen Wong looks at the impact of growing wait times at Waterloo region hospitals and across the province.

The average Ontario emergency room patient waited an hour and 54 minutes to see a doctor in April of this year, tying a record set earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Waterloo region, people waited even longer.

According to Health Quality Ontario, wait times been climbing steadily each month since January 2022 when the provincial average fell to 1.5 hours. In April, the most recent month reported, it hit 1.9 hours.

Locally, emergency room patients at St. Mary’s General Hospital in Kitchener waited an average of two hours in April. At Grand River Hospital, the average wait was 2.6 hours. At Guelph General it was 2.3 hours.

Data from Cambridge Memorial Hospital was not included in Health Quality Ontario’s list, but administrators at the hospital said the average emergency room wait in April was 2.9 hours.

At around noon on Friday, the Cambridge Memorial Hospital’s website showed the current emergency room wait time as five hours. There were 55 patients seeking care, of those 4 were being treated and 51 were waiting.

Cambridge Memorial’s VP of clinical programs and chief nursing executive, Stephanie Pearsall said right now, five hours is a relatively average wait time in the emergency room for less acute patients to see a physician at that time of day.

She said wait times continue to climb due to patients who were unable to seek care during the pandemic.

“Our target provincially is about four hours for those patients that are less sick,” Pearsall said. “We very rarely meet the four hours, I will tell you. We run, generally, it could be six hours it could be eight hours. Our more acute -- our sickest patients -- are seen generally much quicker.”

Wait times can also be attributed to the hospital being at capacity, as well as a shortage of staff. Pearsall believes that with more graduate recruitment and the easing of patient backlogs, things will get better with time.

“We are hopeful we’ll get our feet back underneath us,” Pearsall said.

CTV’s Carmen Wong will have more on what the situation in local emergency rooms means for patients on CTV News Kitchener at Six.

With files from CTV Toronto