About ER Waiting Time

ER Waiting Time helps Quebecers pick the emergency room where they're likely to be seen the fastest. The app combines drive time from your location and the wait time published by the MSSS to surface a clear ranking.

Wait times and stretcher occupancy come from the public dataset "Situation dans les urgences au Québec — données quotidiennes" published by the Quebec Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS) on Données Québec, under a CC-BY 4.0 licence. Hospital names, addresses and locations come from the M02 facilities registry (Données Québec). Addresses you enter are geocoded with Nominatim, and the map tiles come from OpenStreetMap. Drive time is computed locally with OSRM, then refined with real-time traffic from the Google Routes API (or Waze as a fallback). Finally, we keep an hourly history of each ER's occupancy to estimate its usual load.

View the official source

For each indexed hospital we start from the average length of stay (ALOS) published by the MSSS — the arrival-to-departure duration measured on patients who left the ER the previous day, separately for ambulatory and stretcher cases. We then adjust that duration by a pressure factor comparing the current stretcher occupancy to the facility's usual occupancy (the median of our hourly history). The formula is:

wait ≈ previous-day average stay (by case type) × pressure factor
pressure factor = current occupancy ÷ hospital's usual occupancy (clamped to 0.8–2.5)

Drive time is computed via a local OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) instance on the Quebec road graph extracted from OpenStreetMap. For the best candidates we refine it with real-time traffic via the Google Routes API (or Waze as a fallback), across all travel modes (car, transit, bike, walking). If routing is unavailable, we fall back to a crow-flies estimate corrected by a 1.4 detour factor and an 80 km/h average speed — a banner tells you when distances are approximate.

• Closest — driving distance only.
• Shortest drive — drive time only.
• Shortest wait — estimated on-site wait time only.
• Before care — drive + wait.
• Total time — outbound drive + estimated time at the ER (full stay, care included) + return drive.

Our estimate is an informational heuristic, not a clinical model. Actual time to be seen depends on triage, the severity of your case, and how admissions evolve. MSSS data is published hourly — there may be a lag between the real situation and what is shown.

MSSS data licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0).