A recent report says one in 10 patients — equalling 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.
In addition, about 1.5 million people spent more than 14 hours in emergency rooms during the same time span, a 28-per cent increase from 2018–2019.
The data released on Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information 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.”
The report says older adults and people with chronic conditions such as diabetes or high blood pressure are often in the emergency department the longest.
“Longer waits for physician assessment are associated with potential risks, including worsening clinical condition, reduced timeliness of care and a greater likelihood of adverse events,” the report reads.
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.
Cheryl Chui, director of health system analytics at CIHI, said that longer wait times “are really due to factors that are originating outside of emergency departments.”
“We’re seeing patients with more complex needs arriving in the emergency department as well as where we are seeing challenges moving patients through hospitals and into the next level of care when they’re ready to be discharged,” she said.
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“So together, these pressures are contributing to longer wait times in the emergency departments, which means that improving emergency department wait times will involve looking at the entire health system.”
The report states that only age was associated with a longer wait time for a bed, as admission rates “increased with age, and older patients tended to wait longer.”
In addition, patients who could be discharged to long-term care homes, home care or rehab centres were found to be waiting an average of 24 days in hospital inpatient units.
“This likely reflects both bed availability and bed type. Younger patients are more often placed in the next available bed, while older patients with comorbidities or isolation requirements must wait for an appropriate bed, such as an isolation bed or a bed on a specialized unit.”
This is a sector of the health-care system that Dr. Michael Howlett, physician and former president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, believes needs fixing.
“Our population demographics are increasing in age. Our population, therefore, is aging. We’re seeing many more people with multiple health conditions, significant complicated health problems, and they take a lot more time, a lot of work, a lot of hospital care, and then they take that much more care when we try to get them back into the community,” he said.
“There needs to be much more emphasis on how we as a society are going to take care of our elderly frail.”
In addition, the report cites “ongoing staffing shortages” that have led to temporary closures of some emergency department sites, with patients in rural and remote areas in particular being affected. One in four hospitalizations among people living in rural/remote areas were found to have “a high or very high travel burden — a burden which increases with the level of care specialization.”
This is an area that Howlett does not see improving quickly.
Chui also added that “tackling emergency department wait times is really a health system issue that extends beyond the emergency department and the hospital.”
“We see the symptoms of the pressures across the health system manifesting in longer emergency department wait times. But our data suggests that improvements will require system-wide coordinated action across multiple sectors, including primary care, hospital, home, and community care and long-term care.”
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