The number of people leaving the emergency department across the country has been on the rise in recent years.
About a half a million Canadians left emergency departments before being seen by a doctor in 2024, according to a data analysis by CBC’s Marketplace.
Because B.C. and Quebec report these figures based on the fiscal calendar (and include parts of 2025), that number is likely a lot higher.
Took my partner to emerg last winter at 5am when she was so ill I was frightened.
The screen in the ER said an estimated 10 hour 15 minute wait time before seeing a physician or nurse practitioner.
She lasted two hours waiting there before begging me to take her back home. No doctor or medical staff saw her, we went home with nothing. All this to say I am unsurprised others are experiencing the same, it’s awful right now.
I think just not enough people believe the system is bad enough to warrant a drastic political action. If the majority considered it to be dire, that would be reflected in elections. In Ontario we have kept voting for a government that continues to undermine the system. Sounds like the situation is similar elsewhere too. Perhaps a part of the reason is that medical staff are burning themselves out to keep things from failing instead of letting them fail. From the outside, as well as from above, it looks like things “seem to be working.” I’m afraid a lot more people need to get burned for us to make a U-turn.
I think you just effectively demonstrated the cruelty of reform-based politics. Many people here cannot afford to wait for the suburbanites to suspend their capitalist values or develop empathy; how many have died waiting? To suggest that more blood is needed to make this system work is a great example of exactly why it doesn’t and will never work to the benefit of our most vulnerable people.
It is also laughable to consider that the majority decides what policies are platformed in the infamously stratified voting system Canada subscribes to.
. . . where the emergency departments are open at all. (Closures in Thessalon and Richard’s Landing, along the north shore of Lake Superior, often make the news where I am.)
