If you think wait times at Toronto hospitals are already too long, just wait until 2036.

Twenty-five years from now, Toronto is expected to have one million new residents. Its projected the GTA will reach 9.2 million by 2036, a 44 per cent increase from 2011.

Density is rapidly increasing to well above the old city average of 4,077 people per square kilometre, a trend expected to continue to intensify in coming decades.

The citys health-care services, particularly hospitals, are already plagued by long wait times and stretched resources. The average current wait time in a Toronto emergency room is about eight hours.

So what needs to happen to keep quality health care from taking a dive?

Its a question that must be addressed if the province is to prepare for the coming growth in Canadas biggest city.

Dr. Tarek Sardana, president of Orleans Urgent Care in suburban Ottawa, said health-care delivery in high-density urban cores like Toronto could benefit from facilities similar to the one he leads. He describes it as a walk-in clinic on steroids.

Since opening in 1994, at a time when hospitals were facing budget cuts and ER-trained staff were losing their jobs, the Orleans clinics, staffed with emergency-experienced staff, have seen 60,000 patient visits on average annually.

We fill a niche between the hospital, big-city stuff, and the family doctor, Sardana said, adding that most of the costs of a visit there are covered under OHIP. Urgent care, if done properly and not affiliated with a public facility because costs go up in the right spots, where there are crowded emergency departments and difficulty accessing care, they could fill the gap.

The cost of seeing a single patient, who is typically treated and out the door within a few hours, is minimal next to the single-patient cost at a hospital.

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Density and the city: How will Toronto health care cope with population growth?