Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 29/12/2014 (1521 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg's emergency rooms have been seeing a rush of flu patients this holiday season, which prompted us to take a look wait times data pulled from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority website. The WRHA posts a snapshot of ERs in the system, showing the number of patients, average wait time and longest non-urgent wait time at any given point in time, updated every five minutes.

Local programmer and writer Sean Walberg decided to 'scrape' - extract - the data posted to the WRHA website back in September, 2013. His program has since been scraping this data about every five minutes and plugging it all into a neat little spreadsheet, for our perusal.

The data show us a lot of insight into when wait times are highest and how different hospitals are performing. One of the things it allows us to do is calculate the average longest non-urgent wait time at a hospital's ER over a length of time.

The longest non-urgent wait time is the longest a patient has been waiting with a non-urgent condition. People with urgent, life threatening conditions are seen much faster, regardless of wait times and queues.