TORONTO – Out of nearly 16.3 million emergency room visits in one year in Canada, a staggering 1,267,736 patients (7.8%) were not treated because, due to the endless waits, they gave up and left. This is a huge number, marking a 35.6% increase, in 2024, over the previous year: a sign that Canadian healthcare is increasingly in a state of emergency, as highlighted in the report released today by the public policy think tank MEI (Montreal Economic Institute).

The study, conducted by economist Emmanuelle B. Faubert (in the pic above, from the report), analyzes for the first time access and “dropout” data for each Canadian province. In virtually all of them, the situation is alarming, with hundreds of thousands of patients having to forgo emergency room care over the course of a year: from 428,676 Quebecers (out of 3,711,751 visits: 11.5%) to nearly 300,000 Ontario residents (out of 5,950,047 visits: 4.92%) to almost 200,000 Albertans (out of 2,277,268 visits: 8.77%). In the smaller provinces, the situation is even worse, with “renunciation” rates ranging from 14.5% in Prince Edward Island to 13.23% in Manitoba and 12.85% in New Brunswick (the complete table, along with the entire report, is available on the report, here). These percentages are – it’s no an exaggeration to say it – scandalous, for a country that calls itself “civilized”.

“Whether to find a family doctor, consult a specialist, or get emergency care – we read in the introduction to the report – wait times in Canada are infamously long. When Canadians show up at an emergency room, it’s often because they have no other options. Yet, in spite of this, hundreds of thousands of Canadians leave emergency rooms without being treated every year. This phenomenon is one of the most worrisome symptoms of the lack of access to care in Canada…”.

It is true that approximately 50% of people who abandon the service without medical care are classified as non-urgent or semi-urgent (levels P5 and P4 in the Canadian Triage Acuity Scale), but the other 50% are classified as P3, that is still in need of urgent medical care, even if not in imminent danger of life. A phenomenon “particularly troubling – according to Renaud Brossard, vice president of communications at MEI – as it means patients are sent back to the waiting room despite a very real risk of deterioration…”.

So, we read in the conclusion of the report, “to reduce the number of people who leave emergency rooms untreated, the upstream problems accessing care need to be addressed in order to limit ER visits for health problems that could be dealt with elsewhere. Increasing the number of alternatives to emergency rooms would help ease the pressure on the hospital system, thereby reducing wait times. This kind of approach would also help reduce the risk of patients leaving emergency rooms untreated, which can worsen their condition and then require the mobilization of even more resources from Canada’s healthcare systems”.

Pics from the MEI’s report (https://www.iedm.org)