Every emergency room publishes how busy it is. None of them tell you the thing you actually need to know at eleven at night: which one gets you in front of a doctor first, counting the drive. Guardia adds the two together and sorts on the total.

• 120emergency rooms in Quebec
• 16health regions
• onepermission, and only while open

Drive plus wait, added up

Apple Maps gives the driving time for the ten nearest rooms; the relay gives the estimated wait. Guardia sorts on the sum. You can also sort by distance, or see only your favourites. Without location it still works: the wait alone, filtered by region.

The wait is an estimate, and the app says so

Quebec publishes occupancy, not waiting time. The estimate is built from yesterday's average time in the waiting room, adjusted for how busy the room is right now, kept between half and double, rounded to the quarter hour and never under fifteen minutes. It is labelled as Guardia's estimate, never as an official figure.

What a room's page shows

Stretchers in service and occupied, occupancy rate, people waiting to be seen, patients over 24 and over 48 hours, yesterday's average stays, the trend over three hours, the last 24 hours as a curve, and the average shape of this weekday over eight weeks. Every screen carries the age of the data; past two hours it says so plainly.

911 and 811 come first

A band at the top of every screen offers 911 and Info-Santé 811. Guardia gives no medical advice and does no triage — it reads public numbers and adds a drive time.

A widget, and one thing to ask Siri

“My ERs” shows the estimated wait at your favourites, in two sizes, refreshed at most every half hour. Ask Siri and it reads out up to three, always ending with the reminder to call 911 in an emergency.

What leaves, and who receives it

The app asks our relay three questions, and the requests carry nothing but the fingerprint of the copy it already has — no location, no device id, no account. Opening a room's page does tell the relay which room you opened. Apple Maps receives your starting point to compute the drive, as it must. Location is asked for once, used only while the app is open, and stops the moment you leave it.

The numbers are public, and the relay keeps no log

Two open datasets from Quebec's health ministry, both CC BY 4.0, read every fifteen minutes. The relay records no request, no address, no identifier; what it stores is the public readings themselves, kept 400 days so the curves have a past. The privacy page lists every connection.

Seven languages, nine variants: English, French, German, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Italian, Japanese and Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal).

Guardia is at version 0.1 and has not been submitted. The relay has been live since 24 September and is collecting readings hourly. There is nothing to download yet — this page will carry the link when there is.