Wait times are the delays patients experience in accessing care, from emergency department waits to delays for diagnostic imaging, specialist consultation, and surgery. They are both a systemic health-policy issue and a recurring background condition in medical malpractice litigation, where a delay in care is alleged to have allowed a time-sensitive condition to worsen.
The legal difficulty is that systemic wait times and individual standard of care do not map neatly onto one another. A practitioner is generally judged against what a reasonable practitioner could have done in the real conditions they faced, while the systemic causes of delay, such as overcrowding and hallway medicine, raise policy questions the courts continue to work out. Where delay is alleged to have caused harm, the causation analysis asks what difference timelier care would have made to the outcome.
Posts tagged Wait Times analyze Ontario decisions and policy issues in which delays in access to care intersected with patient safety and medical malpractice.
A new report finds one in 10 admitted patients now spend more than 48 hours waiting in the emergency department, and roughly 16,000 died while waiting for care last year. But a broken system is not the same as a winnable malpractice claim. Here is where an ER delay can cross into negligence in Ontario, and where it cannot.
The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal affirms dismissal of a failure-to-refer claim. Breach of standard of care, but causation defeated by referral wait times.
Hundreds of thousands of Canadians leave the ER without being seen each year. Here’s how Ontario law treats wait times, harm, and contributory negligence.
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