Health Department looks at sharing wait times at New Brunswick ERs online

Health officials with the provincial government will look at posting emergency department wait times online so that patients can opt to seek quicker medical attention elsewhere instead of going to a hospital.

The Health Department deputy minister Heidi Liston told MLAs that the current posting of wait times on large displays in some emergency departments could eventually be made available to the public online.

"We've done so much work with dashboards and public facing dashboards for the province during COVID," Liston said during a meeting of the public accounts committee.

She said the department is working with health authorities and others "while we have the public's attention" to create a dashboard with "some of these metrics that are important to the public."

"So we'll certainly take that piece under consideration."

Last December, Horizon Health began posting emergency wait times at its hospitals in Moncton and Saint John so that people arriving could see how long it would take to get medical attention.

Horizon said at the time it would expand that to Miramichi, Fredericton and Waterville.

CEO Dr. John Dornan said the goal was "to encourage the public to consider alternate options for care for non-urgent needs" such as going to a community clinic.

But Horizon didn't say in December whether it would consider posting the wait times online so that patients could choose to not come to the ER at all.

People's Alliance leader Kris Austin told Liston on Thursday that someone on his staff who lives in Woodstock sometimes drives to the health centre in Minto for care, knowing wait times are shorter there.

He suggested "making the public aware of wait times and maybe diverting them to a clinic that's nearby, maybe in a rural area or a community clinic that has a lower wait time."

Liston said the concept dovetails with the new provincial health plan released late last year, which emphasizes making primary care available in local communities to give the system "more bang for our buck" and take pressure off busy hospitals.

"This is really the direction we need to go," she said.

"We need to make sure people are getting in within a reasonable time for primary health care services."

In January the Department of Health estimated that 60 per cent of patients visiting emergency departments could get treatment in a community health setting if they could get in sooner.

Pharmacists were given the power to renew some subscriptions to free up more time in doctors' offices and community clinics and Tele-care 811 was expanded to help refer people to both in-person and virtual medical appointments.

At the same time, ambulance paramedics were given the authority to use "clinical judgment" to decide if someone needed to be taken to the hospital or told to use other options.

Liston's appearance at the committee Thursday focused on the 2020-21 fiscal year, which coincided with the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Asked if Public Health had the staffing, resources and expertise to cope with the pandemic when it began in March 2020, Liston suggested that it did not.

"While we had tremendous expertise in the individuals we had, and still do, I wouldn't say that Public Health has largely been an overly resourced area of Health," she said.

"As time goes on and Public Health emergencies tend to fade into the background, we tend to have spikes and troughs. Public Health tends to be one of those areas that doesn't always get the same attention from year to year."

Liston said officials quickly realized at the start of the pandemic that they needed to bolster staffing and hired 28 people to help translate the office's existing expertise into operations.