When Joey Salmingo took his newborn son to the emergency room in Ontario last December, he did not expect to wait five hours to see the doctor and eight hours to be admitted to the hospital.

According to Salmingo, it took an hour for the two-and-a-half-week-old baby, who had a fever, to be examined by the triage nurse at a North Toronto hospital on December 30.

Salmingo also said that the most problematic and most frustrating thing is the fact that this is common.

Salmingo added that his son was discharged from the hospital on January 2 and is now healthy and returning home.

But according to Dr. Largo Venugopal, an emergency physician working at three hospitals in Toronto, waiting eight hours shattered any notion of acceptable medical care in Canada.

He said that a child with a fever might have sepsis—a serious condition in which the immune system responds strongly to infection—and should be seen by a doctor immediately within 15 to 30 minutes.

Venugopal does not blame emergency room staff, but said the ongoing deteriorating trend in Ontario hospitals, which have long been struggling, makes it nearly impossible to meet Canadian national healthcare standards.

Venugopal said, "As a country, we have failed children, women, seniors, and ordinary patients in these kinds of situations."

He added that the shortage of hospital beds for emergency and non-emergency cases, staff shortages in the system, weakening vaccination and respiratory hygiene among Ontario residents, and lack of doctors increase the strain on the system.

Health Quality Ontario, a regional agency monitoring healthcare standards, found that the average waiting time across Ontario from when someone arrives at the emergency room until first being examined by a doctor or nurse is 2.1 hours.

According to the agency, figures as of October 2023 show that patients admitted to hospitals in Ontario had an average wait of nearly 22 hours in the emergency room before obtaining an inpatient bed, while only 23 percent of patients were admitted to the hospital from the emergency department. The regional targeted admission goal is eight hours.