Grand River Hospital has some of the worst emergency wait times in the country, a new report from a national think-tank says.

According to the report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), the Kitchener hospital’s ER waits are the second-longest among the more than 100 it surveyed nationwide.

While national and provincial wait time averages were found to be around 3.5 hours per wait time visit, Grand River clocked in at closer to seven hours.

“That’s really nine out of 10 patients who are waiting up to 7 hours to be seen by a doctor,” said Kira Leeb, CIHI’s director of health system performances.

“Nobody wants to sit for seven hours, to wait in a waiting room, to be seen by a doctor.”

Other local hospitals were also found to have longer-than-average waits, with St. Mary’s General Hospital averaging a wait time of more than five hours, and Cambridge Memorial Hospital around four hours.

Officials at Grand River say the hospital has made strides in reducing wait times since 2012-13, when the CIHI data was collected.

“We have put a great deal of effort … into improving those numbers over the last couple of years,” Denise Wren, the hospital’s vice-president of medical affairs, told CTV News.

Those changes include bringing in more doctors, modifying nursing staff levels, moving patients out of inpatient units quicker and creating a new unit specifically for patients brought in via ambulance.

Since the data used in the CIHI data was collected, Wren said, wait times at Grand River have dropped closer to the 4.5-hour mark.

“We’ll continue to work on improving our wait times,” she said.

“They’re still not where we want them to be.”

The survey did not include hospitals in Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.