Where the data comes from
Every ER in Quebec reports its situation to the health ministry’s provincial emergency console (MSSS). The ministry publishes those numbers as open data once an hour.
Boussole Santé reads that file every 15 minutes. The numbers are shown as-is: functional stretchers, occupied stretchers, people in the ER, people waiting, average stay. We do no estimating.
The occupancy rate is occupied stretchers divided by functional stretchers. A hospital at 140% has 14 stretcher patients for 10 spots.
The time of the ministry’s last publication appears at the top of the home page. A yellow banner shows up if the source has published nothing for more than two hours.
These numbers measure crowding. They do not predict your personal wait, which depends on triage and on how sick the people ahead of you are. For a life-threatening emergency, call 911.
The public file only keeps 7 days of history. We have archived every reading since August 10, 2026. The typical-hours charts for each hospital are built from that history.