A spokesperson for Southern Health-Santé Sud says there may still come a day when current hospital emergency room wait times in the region are posted on a website. But Dr. Denis Fortier says we're not there yet.

He says when you hear of people going online to check for ER wait times at hospitals in Winnipeg, that's because those hospitals are part of the Emergency Department Information System (EDIS). Fortier says for years they've been working hard to get that system up and running in Southern Health-Santé Sud. And he anticipates by spring, EDIS will be rolled out at Bethesda Regional Health Centre, Boundary Trails Health Centre and Portage District General Hospital.

Fortier adds at this moment, emergency rooms in the region do not have an electronic way of documenting wait times. This could change once they have EDIS, which is an electronic patient record linked to Manitoba eHealth.

He says it will be a very exciting day when they can finally post ER wait times online, noting that would be especially convenient for residents living between a smaller hospital and regional hospital.

"It would have been nice to know if you go to Portage you might wait three hours, if you go to another site, a smaller site, you might wait thirty minutes," he says. "That would be really nice to know."

Not only that, but Fortier says it would be great for smaller emergency rooms to list their hours of operation online as well as average wait times based on the previous year's data.

He adds, wait times vary depending on the severity of the illness or injury. For example, when a person enters an ER, they are given a Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) score. Someone with cardiac arrest would be given the highest score of 1, while someone with sniffles might be given a score of 5 or 6. Because of that, patients aren't seen on a first come first served basis and that means someone with a cold might be waiting in the ER for six hours, while three others who came in after them get seen first.

"Emergency rooms really were designed to be dealing with emergencies, not to be dealing with the type of things that might be best dealt with in a doctor's office," suggests Fortier. "That's happened in rural Manitoba where the emergency rooms end up also acting like a walk-in clinic.

He says their three regional hospitals generally see between 22,000 and 28,000 visits per year.