There is a worsening trend of longer wait times in emergency departments across Canada. The average ER wait time is more than four hours long, and approximately 10 per cent of patients spend eight hours or longer to get looked after in Canadian emergency departments.

In response to this troubling trend, and after identifying a gap in Toronto’s pediatric urgent care services, a group of leading pediatricians have opened kid-E-care, a mid-town Toronto pediatric urgent care clinic.

What is kid-E-care?

Unlike many walk-in clinics, kid-E-care is a full service urgent care centre able to manage urgent, but non-life-threatening conditions such as fevers, colds, minor burns, lacerations, sprains, simple fractures and other ailments, while striving for minimal wait times.

Partnered closely with the established Kindercare Pediatrics practice, the kid-E-care team is comprised of highly respected pediatricians, pediatric emergency medicine physicians, and pediatric nurses with years of experience working in pediatric emergency medicine settings.

The clinic is open when most pediatricians’ offices are closed and when hospital waiting rooms are particularly congested: weeknights from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. and weekends/holidays from noon to 6 p.m.

Instead of spending what could be hours in an emergency waiting room, children and families now have access to state-of-the-art, evidence-based care (including onsite radiology and pharmacy services) for children with urgent medical concerns.

Simply put, kid-E-care’s goal is to provide exceptional pediatric care with shorter wait times than what patients typically experience at hospital emergency rooms. In so doing, kid-E-care will help to unburden some of Toronto’s hospital emergency departments.

For more information about this new clinic, see www.kidecare.ca. You can also follow kid-E-care on Twitter and on Facebook.