Canada

Kelowna residents have the second longest waiting time to visit clinics – Kelowna News

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Kelowna residents spend, on average, the second-longest time Canadian cities waiting to enter a clinic, according to Medimap.

The company, which publishes real-time waiting times for hundreds of clinics across Canada, says Victoria had the highest average wait of 161 minutes in 2021, followed by № 2 Kelowna with 91 minutes.

The Medimap Clinic Waiting Time Index for 2021 shows that British Colombians waited more than twice as long – 58 minutes – to see a doctor at a clinic for a visit than the national average of 25 minutes. The data is for 2021 and comes from more than 1,200 clinics across the country that subscribe to Medimap services.

By comparison, people in Ontario waited an average of 15 minutes, followed by an average of 18 minutes in Alberta, the data show.

Six of the top 10 cities with the longest average waiting time in Canada in 2021 are in British Columbia. Kelowna, White Rock, North Vancouver and Vancouver recorded an average waiting time of 60 minutes or more.

Sherwood Park in Alberta had the shortest waiting time in the country, with patients waiting an average of four minutes to see a doctor on a walk at the clinic.

Eight of the 10 cities with the shortest waiting times in 2021 were in Ontario, although the province also had deviations such as Burlington, where the average waiting time was 51 minutes, according to data collected.

Clinics pay for the use of Medimap software, but the service is free for patients and eliminates the need for patients to call or show up at a clinic just to face a waiting room that is out of capacity.

CEO Blake Adam, a graduate of the University of Victoria Business School, launched Medimap in 2015 with a six-month pilot project in White Rock and in 2016 expanded to 35 clinics in British Columbia, including 15 clinics in Greater Victoria.

Since then, the service has expanded nationwide to Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia. The company says more than 70% of medical clinics in Canada use its software.

While the average waiting time at the Ontario clinic has improved since 2019, the waiting time in British Columbia has increased.

The average waiting time in BC increased by 15 minutes from 2019 to 2021, while the average waiting time in Alberta decreased by seven minutes over the same period. The waiting time in Ontario decreased to 15 minutes in 2021 compared to 26 minutes in 2019.

with a file by Colin Dacre