About and methodology
Urgences Québec gathers the public crowding readings of Quebec's 120 emergency rooms in one place, keeps them hour after hour, and draws out what the official sources do not publish: the trend, the best hours, and a history for each installation.
Appearance
“Light” is the default. “Auto” follows your device setting and changes with it.
What the numbers mean
- Stretcher occupancy rate
- Occupied stretchers divided by functional stretchers, as a percentage. Above 100 %, the emergency room is holding more patients on stretchers than it has places for. We show four levels: calm below 85 %, busy from 85 to 100 %, full from 100 to 120 %, critical above 120 %.
- Functional stretchers
- The number of stretchers the emergency room can actually staff, not the number physically present. It can change from one day to the next.
- Average length of stay (DMS)
- The average time spent in the emergency room, from registration to departure. The MSSS publishes it separately for people on stretchers and for ambulatory patients (those waiting in the waiting room). It is yesterday's average, not a live wait.
- Taken in charge (PEC)
- The moment a doctor takes over a patient's care. The "time to being taken in charge" is the delay between triage and that meeting; the "number of people waiting for PEC" is how many are still waiting to see a doctor.
- Estimated wait
- The estimate Québec.ca publishes for non-priority cases arriving in the waiting room. Priority cases are seen first: depending on severity, the real wait can be much shorter or much longer.
- Stays over 24 h and over 48 h
- The number of patients who have occupied a stretcher for more than 24 or 48 hours. It is the clearest sign of congestion downstream of the emergency room: those patients are usually waiting for an inpatient bed.
- Health region (RSS)
- The administrative map of Quebec's health network, from 01 (Bas-Saint-Laurent) to 18 (Nunavik). Every emergency room belongs to one; code 99 means Quebec as a whole.
Sources
Quebec government sources only. No third-party aggregator, no in-house guess at wait times.
- Hourly emergency room reading (MSSS, via Données Québec)
The official file of stretchers, patients present and people waiting to see a doctor, published every hour.
- Situation in emergency rooms (Québec.ca)
The official page the estimated wait for non-priority cases comes from.
- Cumulative emergency room data (MSSS)
Visits, average length of stay and time to see a doctor by fiscal period, back to 2022-2023. It is the basis of every "History and seasons" section.
Updates
The MSSS publishes a new reading every hour. Our collector polls the source every ten minutes and keeps every reading, which builds the hourly history the official sources do not retain. The Québec.ca estimated wait is re-read every fifteen minutes. Cumulative data is checked every six hours; the MSSS only publishes it at the end of each fiscal period, roughly every four weeks.
Limits
- History starts at the first collection, not at the opening of the emergency rooms: the long charts fill in over time.
- A 0 % occupancy rate at a small installation does not mean it is empty: it may have very few functional stretchers while people are waiting.
- The estimated wait is not published for every installation, and it only applies to non-priority cases.
- The average length of stay is yesterday's average: it describes yesterday, not the wait right now.
- These figures describe how busy an ER is — never the quality of care or the severity of the cases treated.
- Three installations in Nord-du-Québec have no published coordinates: they appear neither on the map nor in any distance.
Important notice
This site is not a medical service and does not replace the advice of a health professional. In a life-threatening emergency — chest pain, difficulty breathing, loss of consciousness, heavy bleeding — call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room without regard to these numbers.
If it is not urgent, call 811: Info-Santé (option 1) to speak with a nurse, Info-Social (option 2), or the primary care access point (option 3) if you have no family doctor. Your pharmacist can also handle many common problems.
Contact
Spotted an error, an installation name that does not match, or have a question about the method?
Email the teamCredits
A creation of Attaboy Intelligence Inc.
Postal codes: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)
Open data
Everything this site shows comes from the Government of Quebec's open data, used under the terms of the Licence ouverte du gouvernement du Québec. No third-party source, no commercial aggregator, no paid data. The raw figures stay available at the source: all we add is the history and the reading.