Exclusive: Santé Québec drops targets for reducing ER overcrowding from medical dashboard
Since Santé Québec took over the online medical dashboard from the provincial Health Ministry in mid-February, it has quietly stopped making public the government’s objectives for reducing emergency-room overcrowding, The Gazette can reveal.
The state corporation managing Quebec’s health-care system has also reduced the number of ER indicators that the public used to be able to view on the online dashboard. Those changes come amid accusations by cardiac surgeons that Santé Québec has been gaslighting the public about wait times for heart operations, showing a dramatic decrease when the reality is far worse.
“The Power BI (database) we have access to is the same as before,” a prominent ER physician told The Gazette. “Nothing has changed in that regard. It’s what they are giving to the public that’s less available, and I don’t know where they’re going with that.”
The ER doctor agreed to be interviewed on condition that their name not be published for fear of reprisals. “If you write an article, don’t make me look not nice with Santé Québec,” the source said. “You don’t need to mention (my name).”
When former health minister Christian Dubé launched the dashboard in 2022, he emphasized the importance for the public — as well as for medical professionals and administrators — to be able to easily view a wide range of statistics about the performance of the network, including figures on ER overcrowding and wait times.
“We made a very important decision — that even if the results are not great at the moment, it’s better to be transparent,” Dubé said at the time, which was two years into the COVID-19 pandemic.
ER targets vanish from Santé Québec dashboard
Previously, below every ER indicator on the dashboard were targets the Health Ministry had set to improve the system. For example, the average stay last Nov. 3 on an ER stretcher across the province was 17 hours and 13 minutes. Below that length of time was the objective hospitals had to achieve months earlier — in fact, by March 31 last year: an average wait in that category of no more than 16 hours.
Today, however, that objective is gone from that category on the Santé Québec website. A horizontal red-dotted line used to run across the chart to show people when over the years the government objective was being met, and most of the time ERs fell far short of that goal. That line is also now missing, giving viewers little to no context that there is, in fact, an ER crisis that has persisted to this day.
Indeed, at some overcrowded hospitals, like the Royal Victoria in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, many ER patients are often not admitted to a bed in a ward, but linger for up to seven days on a stretcher in an ER corridor — deprived of privacy and at risk of falling.
What’s more, previously one had to click on just two links on the Health Ministry dashboard to view all the targets. Now, the process is more convoluted, requiring lots of website clicks and an awareness of how to navigate the Santé Québec dashboard to view those stats.
Santé Québec is moving fast. They want to be agile. They're changing things, and I don't think they've figured out everything. We cannot follow what they're following.
First, from the Health Ministry website, one must click on a link to Santé Québec’s site. Once on it, one must know beforehand to click on the category titled Detailed Portrait (By Theme), among many different tabs. One then lands on another page and one must then click on the category of Urgence, or ERs, to view what is now a reduced array of stats.
The ER source said they can’t understand why the targets are suddenly gone from Santé Québec’s dashboard, and acknowledged the public is not being properly informed. Without that information listed, Quebecers will have no idea whether Santé Québec is, in fact, missing those targets, making the state corporation less accountable to taxpayers.
Asked on Friday why Santé Québec decided to drop the ER targets from its dashboard, spokesperson Geneviève Bettez referred a reporter to a web page with 20 indicators for the entire health-care system, not just ERs.
And none of those indicators include the average length of an ER stay while on a stretcher — a phenomenon known as “hallway medicine” and denounced by emergency specialists as dangerous. The target of less than 16 hours is not on that page, either.
Santé Québec has also dropped a major category that used to appear on the Health Ministry dashboard: the provincewide percentage of ER stretchers occupied by patients for at least 24 hours. On Sept. 29 last year, for example, nearly 27 per cent of all the stretchers in ER hallways in Quebec were occupied for at least 24 hours by patients. The Health Ministry target for that category was zero per cent. All that information has disappeared from Santé Québec’s dashboard today — including the target of zero per cent.
One used to be able to view the ER performance of every hospital across the province for the previous week on the Health Ministry dashboard. Today, that information is not available on Santé Québec’s dashboard. Instead, one must have the foreknowledge to return to the Health Ministry website for that information, and even then, the stats do not go back several days.
A veteran nurse also confirmed to The Gazette that they, too, noticed a big difference between the more in-depth information the Health Ministry used to post on its dashboard about ERs and the fewer indicators Santé Québec is now publishing. Santé Québec became operational on Dec. 1, 2024, with the mandate to run the system more efficiently.
Santé Québec sets new ER target
For 2027-28, Santé Québec has set an ambitious target: to ensure that the average stay for an admitted patient in the ER is less than 19 hours and 30 minutes. But that target is not listed on Santé Québec’s dashboard and is instead found on another web page.
In the most recent period, from Feb. 8 to March 7, the average stay of an admitted patient in Quebec’s ERs was 24 hours and one minute — more than 4 1/2 hours above Santé Québec’s target for next year, underscoring the challenges hospitals face in accomplishing that goal in the coming months.
Asked why less ER information is available on Santé Québec’s dashboard, Bettez claimed the opposite.
“It is worth noting that in February 2026, the (dashboard) was enhanced with the addition of detailed tabs organized by topic to provide a more granular view of the data,” she said in an email.
However, the ER source argued that is simply not true.
“They’ve definitely taken a lot of the ER stats away,” the source said. “Santé Québec is moving fast. They want to be agile. They’re changing things, and I don’t think they’ve figured out everything. We cannot follow what they’re following.”
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