Torontonians waiting too long for 911 calls to be answered: Auditor general report

Toronto residents who need help from police, fire crews, or paramedics, are waiting too long for their calls to be answered, according to a new report from the city’s Auditor General.

In the report going before next week’s police services board meeting, the auditor general has found that the city’s 911 emergency call centre failed to meet its minimum standard for answering calls almost every day last year.

The centre, which is run by the Toronto Police Service, has a minimum standard to answer 90 per cent of all 911 calls within 15 seconds. The report found the call centre did not meet the goal from 2018 to 2021 with many callers waiting more than a minute.

The auditor’s report shows call volume and staffing problems were at the heart of delays last year, which saw more than 13,000 callers wait more than a minute to be answered. At least 424 callers waited more than four minutes and during peak hours the wait times could be eight minutes or longer.

The auditor general says the centre has to hire more operators if it wants to meet the industry standard wait times.

Ontario emergency rooms also struggling with long wait times

Despite a diminishing COVID-19 case load, Ontario’s hospital emergency rooms are also struggling with patients waiting record lengths of time to get admitted to hospital.

The latest statistics published by Health Quality Ontario say patients waited an average of 20 hours in April — the longest average wait time ever for that month in the province.

Time spent in Ontario emergency departments – April 2022

Source: Health Quality Ontario

Doctors say patients are now coming in to hospitals with a variety of post-COVID issues, such as lung damage, blood clots, strokes and heart attacks.

Dr. Kashif Pirzada, a Toronto emergency room physician, recently took to Twitter to share his concerns about the health care system he says is on the brink of collapsing.

“The public doesn’t realize it but the system you have come to rely on is being held together by duct tape and glue.” Dr. Pirzada told CityNews. “We have never seen it this bad in our entire careers.”

Dr. Pirzada said wait times can now be between six and eight hours if you go to the emergency rooms. He says the province should be giving these clinics and primary care doctors the tools to function safely.

SicKids’ hospital also recently reported children are waiting up to four times longer than usual.

With files from Shauna Hunt