The Canary in the Coal Mine: Emergency Department Wait Times

Now, a number of the emergency physicians that I've spoken to over the past, say, year do talk about how their hospital beds are full at 90 plus, 100 percent and even over capacity.

Are there enough beds?

So what hospitals are mostly running at 90 or above occupancy, and this is on average.

So this doesn't account for those times of year where we know there will be surges and a greater need for hospital beds, such as during the winter flu season.

And that's when we've heard that hospitals can be operating at 130 or 140% capacity.

And so that really doesn't leave any room in the system to think flex and to accommodate incoming patients.

We also know that from when we compare with other countries that Canada does have the lowest number of acute care beds per capita out of a number of international comparisons.

So that's something that it's not the only factor, but hospital bed availability is definitely a part of the story.

One of the other measures that you took is how long patients who are in hospital, who are waiting for a spot, either in home care or long-term care are waiting.

And that was a long time too.

So in 2024, 2025, the majority who needed to move from the emergency department to acute care stayed in acute care for about four days and discharged after treatment.

When we compare that to patients who had a delayed discharge because they were waiting for another type of care, they stayed in hospital for 24 days.

So that's 20 days longer than the typical patient.

And those waiting for long-term care stayed for typically 44 days.

That's 40 days longer than the typical patient.

So these are examples of bottlenecks in the system where delayed discharge of these patients means less capacity and availability of hospital beds for the incoming patients.

And what are you hoping to achieve with this report?

health systems across Canada already recognize the challenges.

And what we're hoping with this report is that we can help provide the data and evidence to support the work that's already underway.

We know that there are many innovative solutions being tried by hospitals and health systems across the country.

And this just really speaks to the need for those sorts of solutions that don't focus just on what's happening in the emergency room, but also look at the upstream factors such as primary care and access to specialist care, as well as downstream factors such as access to long-term care, home care, and other supports that patients need.