When to go to the ER in Calgary

Chest pain, stroke signs, trouble breathing, heavy bleeding: call 911. This page is for the trips that can't wait for your doctor but don't need an ambulance.

Adults

Best time to arrive
Worst time to arrive
Quickest ER
Best day and time

Kids (17 and under)

Best time to arrive
Worst time to arrive
Quicker kids ER
Best day and time

Go now or wait?

ArriveExpected real waitSeen around

When you're planning for right now, the page reads the live posted wait from AHS and scales the estimate by how busy that site is compared with normal for this hour. You can also type a posted wait in.

Adult ERs at that arrival time

HospitalExpected real waitPosted then (typical)Posted now

Kids ERs at that arrival time

HospitalExpected real waitPosted then (typical)Posted now

Best day and time

Real wait in hours at the quickest open ER, for each day and arrival hour. Tap a square to see which hospital.

Adults

Kids

Real wait by arrival hour, in hours (whole week)

How this is worked out

AHS posts a wait for each site every few minutes. That number comes from patients already seen, so it lags: if 10 am shows 3h20, those people walked in around 6:40. To estimate the wait you would have, the page uses the shift-back rule. Arriving at time T, your wait W is the one where the posted wait at T + W is about W. It's solved per site from the median posted wait for each half hour, adjusted for the day of the week.

A small collector reads the AHS feed every 10 minutes and the page is rebuilt every night. These are medians, not promises; a bad night can double any of them. Sicker patients are always seen first, whatever the clock says.