Nearly one in 10 Canadians who were admitted to hospitals from the emergency department during the 2024-2025 fiscal year spent more than 48 hours waiting on a stretcher or in a chair before being assigned a bed, a new study suggests.
The report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) also found that, out of 16.1 million ER visits last year, roughly 1.5 million patients spent more than 14 hours in the emergency department.
“There’s a national crisis around emergency services because we’ve optimized everything,” Paul Parks, a past president of the Alberta Medical Association and ER physician, said in the report. “We’ve taken all the elasticity out of the system, but the tap is still flowing. There’s a crisis: insufficient connected community resources, and little continuing care and long-term care.”…