Canadians continue to languish in ER waiting rooms longer than patients in any other developed country, a new report says.

About one in 10 patients seeking emergency care in Canada will wait eight hours or more, while the average length of an ER visit in this country is more than four hours, according to an international survey released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

“Canada overall ranked last out of 11 (developed) countries on waits for emergency department care,” said Kathleen Morris, director of Systems Analysis and Emerging Issues at CIHI.

“When we look at an international survey that looked at the per cent who wait more than four hours, it’s below 20 per cent (of patients) in all countries except Canada.”

Indeed, where half of Canadian patients will be cooling their heels for more than four hours during ER visits, less than 5 per cent of emergency room patients in the U.K., Germany and the Netherlands face similar delays.

Ontario and Alberta are the only Canadian provinces that provide comprehensive wait-time data for emergency departments.

But Morris says the ER figures from those provinces can be extrapolated across Canada when intermittent surveys conducted in other areas of the country are added.

Emergency room waits here are driven partly by the lack of rapid access Canadians have to their family doctors, Morris said.

The appointment lags Canadians face in seeing family physicians and specialists, are also the worst among Western nations, she added.

The lengths of Canadian ER stays have actually improved between 2008 and 2012, said Morris, decreasing in Ontario by 22 per cent for patients with serious maladies and 15 per cent for those with more minor ailments.

But the long wait times for family physicians and specialists have barely budged since 2004, she said.

More than half of Canadians can’t book a primary-care physician appointment the same or next day, Morris said.

“That really hasn’t changed over the last 10 years.”

Meanwhile, wait times of three months or more for specialists are commonplace and have proven similarly intractable, Morris said.

What’s needed to bring all these access times down, she said, is for government health agencies to set target wait goals like those that sent times plunging for procedures such as joint replacement surgeries .

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“The concept of identifying priorities, setting targets and publicly measuring progress has been very successful with pan-Canadian surgical priorities,” Morris said. “And those factors could be successful in reducing E.D. (emergency department) waits.”

Pilot programs now looking at schemes to rejig doctor schedules and alternative emergency room flow strategies could also point to broader solutions.