One in 10 Canadian emergency room doctors are exiting the profession, with many reporting feeling that “the future of emergency medicine was hopeless.”
A Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) study released Monday states that Canadian emergency doctors feel the industry is “broken” and has “no possibility of recovery.”
“Respondents pointed to a broken health care system, unrealistic societal expectations, and insurmountable workplace challenges as reasons for burnout,” the study states. “The consequences were physician distress and leaving the profession. Mechanisms to continue in emergency medicine were reducing work hours, modifying work roles, and changing health care institutions.
Out of 410 respondents, 41 said they left emergency medicine — 25 shifted to a different area of practice, 10 retired and six left clinical medicine, meaning they stopped treating patients altogether.
Also, out of 351 remaining doctors who completed the full survey, 163 of them (46 per cent) scored high on emotional exhaustion and 193 (55 per cent) scored high on depersonalization, a state in which “an individual perceives or experiences a sensation of unreality concerning the self or the environment.”
Nearly half of survey respondents also reported reducing clinical hours, while 20 per cent have reported taking time off.
Dr. Catherine Varner, emergency physician and deputy editor at CAMJ, said what is most worrisome about the findings is that emergency health-care workers “felt not only could they not provide the standards of care, but they felt without any ability to do anything about it.”
“They felt that the systems that they were working in were unable to change.”
In particular, both younger and female participants were noted to experience higher volumes of burnout, a cause of concern that is growing in Canadian health care.
As a result, those positions can become harder to replace or fill.
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“It’s a huge threat to the workforce,” says Dr. Kerstin de Witt, professor in emergency medicine at Queen’s University.
“If emergency physicians are leaving at the start of their profession, then we lose their entire career of working in the emergency department,” de Witt said.
One in 10 patients — equaling around 180,000 people — who were admitted to an emergency department in Canada spent more than 48 hours waiting for an inpatient bed in 2024-25, according to a June Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) report.
The data highlighted that many emergency departments across Canada “are facing challenges with overcrowding, staffing shortages, and limited bed and stretcher capacity that have not kept pace with growing demand.”
Older adults and people with chronic conditions such as diabetes or high blood pressure are often in the emergency department the longest.
There were 16.1 million visits to emergency departments across Canada in 2024-25, according to CIHI. Twelve per cent of those visits resulted in hospital admission.
Overcrowding was an issue mentioned throughout CAMJ’s study, according to Varner.
“Many of the respondents reported that they were working in emergency departments that were continuously overcrowded, meaning that they didn’t have enough space to work because the departments had too many admitted patients in the care spaces of the emergency department,” she said.
Roughly 15 per cent of the emergency room physicians in Ontario responded to the survey — with the vast majority of those polled reporting issues.
Seventy-four per cent of those who answered said overcrowding was either severe or critical, while 76 per cent said overcrowding affected their ability to provide timely care “on most shifts or nearly every shift.”
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