How it works

Surgery, scan and monthly ER numbers come from Ontario Health, August 2026. Live ER waits come from each hospital’s own website. This site is not part of Ontario Health or any hospital.

Days: Average days waited by patients at priority 4, the least urgent level, whose wait ended in the period shown. Ontario Health counts only finished waits, so people still waiting are not in the number. Adult figures on the surgery pages, children’s figures on the children’s pages.
Period: Most figures cover one month, August 2026. For less common procedures Ontario Health publishes only a longer period: a quarter, a half-year or a fiscal year (April to March). Those show their dates beside the number, and every hospital for that procedure covers the same period. The two waits for one surgery can cover different periods; each is labelled.
Days to see surgeon: From the day the surgeon gets the referral to the first appointment with the surgeon. Ontario Health calls this Wait 1.
Days to surgery: From the day the patient and surgeon decide on surgery to the day of surgery, minus any days the patient said they were not available. Ontario Health calls this Wait 2.
Total days: Days to see surgeon plus days to surgery. Ontario Health does not publish this sum. It leaves out the time between the two for tests and other appointments, which nobody tracks, so the real wait is longer.
Days to scan: From the day the hospital gets the order to the day of the MRI or CT scan, minus any days the patient was not available.
Heart procedures: Angiography is timed from referral to procedure. Angioplasty and heart bypass are timed from the day the heart centre accepts the patient to the procedure. These come from the CorHealth Cardiac Registry and have one wait, not two.
Not shown: Hospitals with fewer than 10 patients in the period. Ontario Health itself hides numbers under 6 patients.
Children's hospitals: SickKids and CHEO appear in Ontario Health’s adult MRI and CT figures. They treat children, so they are marked Children only and are never picked as the shortest wait on adult pages.
Names: Plain names on this site. Each procedure page also shows Ontario Health’s own category name.
Distance: Straight line, not driving. A postal code is placed at the middle of all the postal codes that share its first three characters. A rural postal code (second character 0, like P0L 1C0) goes to its own town. Data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0), grouped by postal area.
ER: wait right now: The hospital’s own live figure, from its website, checked about every 5 minutes. Hospitals measure it differently: some give a forecast of the time to see a doctor, some the average of patients seen recently, some a range. Each is shown as the hospital states it, with how long ago it was updated. A figure more than 90 minutes old is not shown. Live waits are estimates, for general information only. They can change quickly and without warning, are not guaranteed, and are not medical advice or a recommendation of one emergency department over another. Your own wait may be longer or shorter, and the sickest patients are seen first.
ER: to see a doctor: Average time from triage or registration to the first assessment by a doctor, nurse practitioner or dentist, for all patients that month. 9 in 10 seen within: the 90th percentile.
ER: time in the ER: Average total time in the emergency department. Low urgency, sent home: target 4 hours. High urgency, sent home: target 8 hours. Admitted: time in the ER before getting a bed upstairs. Source: Ontario Health, from the National Ambulatory Care Reporting System (CIHI). Monthly, not live.
12-month line: Each month’s number for the last year. The faint line is the Ontario average. The change beside it compares the average of the last 3 months with the first 3, so one unusual month does not swing it.
Gaps in a trend line: Months Ontario Health did not publish a number, or had too few patients to show one. For smaller hospitals Ontario Health often publishes one figure per quarter or year instead of per month. Those are left out of the monthly line.

Not medical advice.