Frequently asked questions

Temps aux Urgences is a free, bilingual web app that helps Quebecers choose the emergency room where they are likely to be seen fastest. For each indexed ER, the tool adds two durations — the time to get there from your location and the wait time currently observed on site — then ranks hospitals from fastest to slowest.

It is an information and guidance tool. It makes no diagnosis and replaces neither Info-Santé 811 nor 911.

Yes — completely free, no ads, no account and no install. It's an independent citizen project built on open public data. You open it, allow (or not) geolocation, and get a ranking right away.

Every ER in Quebec that reports its data to the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux (MSSS) and appears in the public “Situation in Quebec emergency rooms” dataset. A few facilities without stretchers, or that didn't report on a given day, may show partial or missing data.

No, and this matters. With serious symptoms, call 911 immediately. If you're unsure whether to go in, call 811 (Info-Santé): a nurse will assess your symptoms. Temps aux Urgences comes in afterwards — to compare options once the decision to go to the ER has been made.

Triage is the quick assessment a nurse performs as soon as you arrive. Its purpose is to gauge how serious your condition is in order to decide who must be seen first. It is not “first come, first served”: someone in a life-threatening state is seen before a stable person, even if they arrived later.

Quebec uses the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS), graded from 1 to 5 by clinical urgency:

• Level 1 — Resuscitation: immediate life threat (cardiac arrest, major trauma). Seen immediately.
• Level 2 — Emergent: potential life threat (chest pain, stroke signs). Target around 15 minutes.
• Level 3 — Urgent: serious but stable. Target around 30 minutes.
• Level 4 — Less urgent: target around 60 minutes.
• Level 5 — Non-urgent: target around 120 minutes.

These targets are national objectives, not guarantees: a sudden influx of serious cases mechanically pushes back lower-priority ones.

No, and this is a key point. The displayed durations are averages over all patients in a category (ambulatory or on a stretcher). They don't know your personal triage level.

As a result: if your condition is judged very urgent (level 1 or 2), you'll be seen far faster than the average; if it's judged non-urgent (level 4 or 5) on a busy day, you could wait longer than the figure shown. The average describes the facility, not your specific case.

Because their triage ranked them more urgent than you. The order of treatment follows clinical severity, never order of arrival. That's the very logic of triage: treat first those whose outcome depends on speed. It's frustrating while you wait, but it's exactly what saves lives.

From the public “Situation in Quebec emergency rooms” dataset, published by the MSSS on the Données Québec platform under the Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 licence. We read the official API and never alter the source figures: the tool only combines and sorts them.

The MSSS refreshes its figures roughly once an hour. The Données Québec mirror typically lags the official extract by 30 to 45 minutes.

In practice, what you see reflects the situation one to two hours ago — it's a recent snapshot, not a live, second-by-second feed. An ER may have cleared (or filled up) since the last publication.

The ALS is the average time, from arrival to departure, spent at the ER by patients who left the previous day. It's a structural figure — computed over one completed day — not a live stopwatch. It reflects the facility's usual “processing speed”: a hospital with a 4-hour ALS treats its patients on average twice as fast as one at 8 hours.

The MSSS publishes two distinct averages, because the two groups go through very different journeys:

• Ambulatory ALS — for patients who stay in the waiting room or on a chair (lighter cases, usually discharged home). Often a few hours.
• Stretcher ALS — for patients lying on a stretcher (heavier cases, possible observation or admission). Generally longer.

Each average covers the full arrival-to-departure stay of its group: no need to add them up. The tool lets you pick the profile that best matches your situation to display the relevant estimate.

It's the ratio of occupied stretchers to functional stretchers: occupancy = (occupied stretchers ÷ functional stretchers) × 100.

Yes, it frequently exceeds 100%. That means there are more patients lying down than planned stretchers — overflow stretchers are then set up in the hallways. A rate of 150% means “one and a half times normal capacity.” It's the most telling indicator of the real pressure on an ER.

They summarise stretcher pressure at a glance:

• Green (calm) — occupancy below 80%.
• Yellow / orange (busy) — occupancy between 80% and 120%.
• Red (saturated) — occupancy above 120%.

The colour depends only on stretcher occupancy, regardless of the case type you selected. It tells you how much pressure the facility is under right now.

The raw ALS describes yesterday; the pressure factor corrects it for today. We compare the current stretcher occupancy to the same hospital's “normal” occupancy (its historical median).

The calculation: factor = current occupancy ÷ usual occupancy, clamped between 0.8 and 2.5. A hospital twice as busy as usual sees its estimate multiplied by about 2; a quieter-than-usual hospital, reduced. The displayed estimate is therefore: ALS × pressure factor.

The bounds avoid showing unrealistic durations — never “20 minutes” on a perfectly calm morning, never “14 hours” at full saturation. Note: collection of the occupancy history began in summer 2026; while that history is short, the tool falls back to an absolute scale based directly on the occupancy rate.

These counters, published by the MSSS, describe how congested the ER is:

• Patients present — the total number of people currently in the ER (waiting room and stretchers combined).
• Awaiting medical care (PEC) — those who have already arrived and been triaged by the nurse, and are now waiting to be seen by a physician for the first time.
• Present over 24h / 48h — congestion signals: the more patients who have stayed a very long time (often waiting for an inpatient bed), the more clogged and slow the ER is.

From your location (your browser's GPS or an address you enter), the tool computes the actual road route to each ER using OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine), a routing engine built on the OpenStreetMap road network. It therefore knows the streets, one-way roads and highways — not just the “as the crow flies” distance.

There are three levels of precision, from coarsest to finest:

• As the crow flies (simplest) — we draw a straight line between you and the hospital, correct it by a factor of 1.4 to approximate road distance, then divide by an average speed of 80 km/h. Fast to compute but imprecise: ignores actual roads, detours and bridges.
• Road route (OSRM) — follows the real street network and estimates duration from each segment's normal speeds. This is the default calculation. It ignores current traffic, though: a traffic jam doesn't change its result.
• Real-time route — queries a live traffic service that accounts for jams, accidents and roadwork to the minute. This is the most faithful to your actual driving time.

Why not real-time everywhere? Because it's costly and slow to query for around a hundred hospitals. So the tool computes all of Quebec with OSRM, then only refines in real time the few ERs already ranked highest — where precision actually changes your decision.

Because distance isn't time. A hospital 12 km away via highway can be faster to reach than one 7 km away through congested streets and traffic lights. That's exactly why the tool separates the “closest” mode (which sorts by distance) from the “shortest drive” mode (which sorts by duration).

The tool automatically falls back to the as-the-crow-flies estimate (distance × 1.4 ÷ 80 km/h) and shows a banner warning you that distances are approximate. You keep a useful ranking, simply with less precision on drive times.

Yes: car, public transit, bike or walking. For biking (computed at 15 km/h) and walking (4 km/h), the tool takes the road distance and recomputes the duration at human speed, and limits the search to a reasonable radius (10 to 20 km depending on the mode) — suggesting a hospital 80 km away on foot would make no sense.

It adds up the relevant durations and sorts ERs from shortest to longest time, according to the sort mode you pick. Facilities with unavailable data are pushed to the bottom of the list rather than distorting the ranking.

The tool offers five ways to rank ERs:

• Closest — road distance only. To spot the geographically nearest hospital.
• Shortest drive — drive time only (with real-time traffic when available). The fastest to reach.
• Shortest wait — estimated on-site wait only, ignoring travel.
• Before care — travel + wait. The estimated time before the medical team takes care of you.
• Total time — travel + wait + stay + return. The best approximation of when you'll get back home.

For most people, “Before care” or “Total time” give the most realistic view of what lies ahead.

Yes. The “total time” mode adds the trip there, the on-site wait, the average length of stay, then the return to your starting point. It's the most complete estimate of what the whole undertaking will cost you, from leaving home to getting back.

As a rule: choose ambulatory if you can wait seated in the waiting room and will likely go back home (sprain, fever, small cut); choose on a stretcher if your condition requires lying down and monitoring (severe pain, serious distress).

When in doubt, triage on arrival will decide anyway. This choice only serves to display the length-of-stay average most representative of your situation.

No. Geolocation is used only, on your device, to compute distances to hospitals. It is neither stored nor sold. You can also enter an address manually instead of enabling GPS, if you prefer.

They are informational heuristics, not a clinical model. They rely on averages and on data published with a slight delay. Reality on a given evening may differ: a mass-casualty accident, an outbreak or a hospital IT outage won't show up in the figures right away.

Four limits are worth recalling before you rely on the ranking:

• Wait times are averages, not your personal wait — which depends above all on your triage level.
• Data lags the real situation by roughly one to two hours.
• The pressure factor is an estimate still being calibrated.
• Real-time traffic only covers the already top-ranked hospitals, and a facility that didn't report its figures may be missing or incomplete.

Immediately, at any serious sign: chest pain, stroke signs (drooping face, arm weakness, speech trouble), difficulty breathing, heavy bleeding, loss of consciousness or major trauma. In those cases, don't wait for any ranking — call 911. For a simple doubt, 811 (Info-Santé) will guide you, free of charge.