A 55-year-old man who spent nearly 24 hours waiting for a bed in the emergency room last month said Ontario's healthcare system needs change.

Dan Trivett also told CTV News Toronto that he was involved in a collision in Mississauga on October 26. As a result, he spent three hours at Mount Sinai Hospital for injury assessment before being sent home. However, shortly after starting to prepare dinner, Trivett says he began experiencing severe abdominal pain. He told CTV News Toronto, "I felt like I was being stabbed with a knife and that my ribs were being crushed and I couldn't breathe."

Also, the family eventually managed to call 911, and Trivett was transported to Toronto General Hospital around 2 a.m., where he said he waited on a stretcher for two to three hours with a heart monitor to make sure he was not having a heart attack.

During those three hours, the paramedics who transported him in the ambulance stayed by his side. Then after that, Trivett was asked to go to the Rapid Assessment Centre, which he described as a room with a chair. He stayed there until he was admitted to the hospital around 2 a.m., spending nearly 24 hours in total. Throughout the experience, Trivett said there was no privacy and he could hear doctors talking to other patients about their conditions.

Also, wait times in emergency rooms across Ontario reached a record high in September, according to Health Quality Ontario (HQO) data, patients spent an average of 21.3 hours in the emergency room waiting for admission, up from 20.7 hours in August and 20.8 hours in July.

Earlier this week, Ontario Liberals said September was "the worst September ever extending back to 2008." In addition, Dr. Adel Shamji, MPP, told reporters in a press conference: "No matter how you look at this data, whether month over month, or year over year, healthcare performance continues its dramatic decline and unfortunately is now in free fall."

In the same context, an Ontario Health report submitted to executives and heads of emergency departments, leaked by Shamji, showed that an average of about 946 patients were waiting for a hospital bed in emergency rooms across the province at 8 a.m. daily that month. The report also showed that ambulance offload times jumped about 52.5 percent last year, meaning that patients waited an average of about 90 minutes before hospital admission in September.

The Ontario government has pledged to add up to 6,000 new healthcare workers as part of its plan to stabilize healthcare after the pandemic. They also said they will invest in private clinic surgeries and introduce legislation allowing hospitals to transfer patients waiting for long-term care to a non-choice home—two ideas hoped to free up hospital beds for acute care patients.