Long waits in Canadian emergency rooms are a widespread problem, according to a new report highlighted by CBC News. The findings put numbers to an experience many families know firsthand, having to take someone who is seriously ill to an emergency department and then face hours of waiting for care.
The scale of the data is striking. The report covers 14.8 million ER visits in Canada between 2024 and 2025, and found that 50 percent of patients spent four hours or less waiting, while 40 percent waited between five and 14 hours, and 10 percent faced even longer waits.
The picture is worse for those who need to be admitted to hospital. Among admissions, 10 percent involved an ER wait of 48 hours or more before an inpatient bed became available, a bottleneck that keeps the sickest patients stuck in the emergency department.
That delay has also grown over time. According to the report, the 48-hour-plus wait for a bed is about 12 hours longer than it was in 2018 and 2019, pointing to a system under increasing strain rather than one that is recovering.
Experts trace the problem to a mix of pressures on patients and the wider system. There are more older patients arriving with a range of chronic conditions and more complex needs, alongside broader system-wide issues that slow everything down.
Several of those issues sit outside the emergency room itself. The report points to a shortage of family doctors and long-term care beds, as well as long waits for tests and scans, all of which funnel more people into already crowded emergency departments.
For the doctors who work in those departments, the stakes are stark. One emergency room physician warned that this is not just an inconvenience but really a matter of life and death, a fear he said is backed by research showing that patients who wait in the ER for care face a greater risk.