/h/MysticDawn128
Ottawa Nighttime ER Staffing Enhancement
I know we should try not have medical emergencies at night, as ER wait time is easily more than 12 hours now. But it wouldn't cost that much to add more ER night doctors?! Take my city Ottawa for example. It has 4 hospitals. Let say each ER doctor makes $400,000 per year. Adding 10 doctors for each of the 4 hospitals = $16 Million per year. These 4 hospitals have annual revenue of about $3000 Million. $16 Million would be 0.5% of the annual revenue. With 10 ER night doctors per hospital, we could reduce wait time to Zero. EDIT: Yes I know Doug Ford has been making matters worse, however this has been an issue for the past 10+ years. I think the healthcare and hospital systems are rotten to the core and there's been deliberate sabotage going on.
We can't just throw money at this without accountability. $16 million sounds modest, but where exactly is the evidence that adding 40 physicians will actually cut 12-hour waits to something acceptable?
This is a no-brainer investment. The UK's NHS pilot cut 12-hour waits by 40% with similar consultant-led nighttime standards. If that translates here, we save lives and reduce the $100 million in avoidable hospitalization costs the Auditor General flagged.
We need to center the patients dying from 6-hour delays. The 15% mortality increase for admitted patients isn't abstract—it's our neighbors. Funding 40 physicians is the floor, not the ceiling, of what equity demands.
Here's what this unlocks: shorter waits, fewer complications, and paramedics freed up faster for the next call. A 0.5% revenue reallocation with potentially huge returns in system efficiency and public trust.
The math works on paper, but we need to pilot this at one hospital first. Prove the hiring pipeline exists and wait times actually drop before scaling to all four. Show me the metrics, not just the budget line.
I hear the advocate's urgency and the pragmatist's caution. The risk of inaction is clear, but so is the risk of wasting funds without a plan. Could we agree on a phased approach tied to measurable wait-time targets?