How full the Pontiac hospital's emergency room is right now — stretchers in use and people waiting, from the health ministry's hourly published data.
Town Tools builds free, public tools for Shawville and towns around the world. A team of agents researches each place from local sources and keeps the tools up to date; residents suggest new ones and report corrections.
How full is the Pontiac hospital's emergency room right now? Québec's health ministry publishes an hourly snapshot of every ER in the province — stretchers in use, how many people are there, how many are still waiting to be seen. This page reads that file for the hospital on Argue Street, so you can see the same picture the system sees, without hunting through a provincial table.
In an emergency, go — don’t check this page first
2 of the ER’s 4 stretchers are in use right now.
Hospital snapshot from 0:00:00.
These numbers look old
These numbers show how full the ER is — never how long you personally will wait. Patients are seen by how sick they are, not the order they arrive.
Yesterday’s average visit, start to finish: about 16 h 24 min for patients on a stretcher, 4 h 07 min for walk-in patients. That’s yesterday’s average — not a prediction of your wait.
Info-Santé 8-1-1
Free nurse advice line, day and night, with service in English. A nurse can tell you whether the ER, the CLSC or a clinic is the right place for what you have.
Pontiac Community Hospital (Hôpital du Pontiac)
The Pontiac Community Hospital ER's average stretcher stay jumped to about 17 hours in 2024–25, from about 7 hours the year before, and the share of patients spending more than 48 hours on a stretcher rose from 1.5% to 6.2% — the only Outaouais hospital whose ER grade declined that year. ER visits have nearly doubled in five years, and at last report 14 of the hospital's 33 beds were occupied by patients waiting for a transfer elsewhere — which is a big part of why stretchers back up.
Around 2,000 people in the Pontiac have been without a family doctor, and Shawville's Lotus clinic — built to keep 12 family doctors under one roof — has been up for sale since early 2025. When people can't see a doctor, more of what they have ends up at the ER. If you don't have a family doctor, register with the province's family doctor finder (GAMF) below; while you wait, 811 can triage most everyday problems.
The province publishes the same situation data for every ER:
Data: Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux, “Fichier horaire des données de la situation à l’urgence”, via Données Québec (CC BY 4.0). Updated hourly, published about 45 minutes behind the pictured hour. (dataset)