July 30, 2026
Toronto Star
By Douglas Sinclair, Contributor
Doug Sinclair is a retired ED physician and health care leader, and now an MFA student at Kings College in Halifax writing a book of hope on Acute Health Care in Canada
While politicians have been talking about decreasing emergency room wait times, patients across the country are continuing to wait longer and longer to see a doctor or be admitted.
The latest report from the Canadian Institutes of Health Information (CIHI) told a familiar story about ER wait times in 2024-25. One in 10 patients (180,000) in Canada waited in the ER for up to 48 hours to be admitted to a hospital bed, and 1.5 million patients waited more than 14 hours — wait times that are 28 per cent higher than they were in 2018-19. The reason wasn’t in the emergency department itself but, according to Cheryl Chiu, director for health system analytics for CIHI, is related to the collapse of primary care, an aging and complex population, lack of long-term care for patients in hospital and limited home care options.
We know that these long waiting times are also responsible for the deaths in both the ER and ER waiting rooms, which seem to be a weekly news item across Canada. Emergency physicians across Canada are suffering from burnout, with 48 per cent reducing their hours of work and 10 per cent leaving the profession altogether, according to a study led by Dr. Kerstin De Wit from Queen’s University and published this week in the Canadian Medical Association journal. ER physicians feel they are being blamed for the long waits and do not feel supported by either their hospital administration or provincial governments.
Read more at the Toronto Star
