Canada's Dysfunctional Healthcare System Fears ER Surge over Holidays

Health providers in Canada have expressed concern in the weeks leading up to Christmas and the New Year that the country’s overburdened healthcare system could see a dangerous surge in the number of patients in emergency rooms, encouraging prospective patients to exhaust other available options before going to hospitals.

The holidays approach following the publication of reports this month that wait times to see doctors in Canada, particularly specialists, are longer than even in the modern history of the country, and thousands of Canadians are dying on waitlists for life-saving medical interventions.

Canada boasts a public universal healthcare system, a socialist program in which the government uses taxpayers’ dollars to pay for most services, and every Canadian is covered under the universal system. Canadian patients have long suffered, sometimes deadly, wait times for necessary care, as well as access to substandard services and minimal alternatives to the care the government proscribes. Socialists often tout Canada as a model for the world in pioneering universal health care and blame the overt shortcomings of the system on “underfunding,” providing little context for exactly how much money would ensure a functional system.

Writing at the Global and Mail this month, physician James Maskalyk lamented that emergency rooms often struggle with high volumes of patients because Canadians stranded by their system used emergency rooms instead of increasingly inaccessible family doctors — or even social services for the poor beyond medical needs.

“True emergency cases are surrounded by people accessing other forms of basic care — not just medical, but food, clothing, shelter, even safety,” Maskalyk narrated. “Should you come to the ER, know that you will be triaged quite quickly, but after that there is often an interminable wait.”

“For the sickest we make space right away. Otherwise, the time of day matters more than most realize. Hospitals, and consequently ERs, run at their highest staffing capacity on weekdays, during business hours. Best to come at 8 a.m. rather than 8 p.m. Mondays are almost always the busiest,” the doctor advised.

Maskalyk observed that, in addition to the struggle of addressing problems that the emergency room is not necessarily equipped to, such as “clothing” and “safety,” he noted that the rest of the hospital is often suffering from significant bed shortages.

“If you ask an ER doctor or nurse what contributes most to the stress, you might hear about the shrinking number of beds available to see new patients,” he noted, “because admitted patients are spending days in the ER before there is room for them in another unit. A person in the waiting room might cite the lack of a family doctor. The demand is simply too great.”

Maskalyk advised, in the long term, “radical health care reform.” In the short term, he suggested Canadians should try other avenues of service besides the emergency room if possible.

“If your problem is not an emergency but still timely, consider your family physician but also walk-in clinics, urgent-care centres or the increasing number of virtual options. Some pharmacists are also trained to prescribe for straightforward conditions,” he noted.

Horizon Health Network, which administers the public healthcare system in New Brunswick, responded in anticipation to concerns about emergency room performances during the holidays on December 17, a move that followed what the CBC called and unfortunate “hospital holiday crunch at emergency departments” in 2023.

As the Globe and Mail noted, the lack of empty beds for patients that need more time in the hospital is a major struggle to keep the emergency room functional. Horizon CEO Margaret Melanson told the CBC that “a lack of nursing home spaces continues to be the biggest reason for lack of hospital capacity.”

“About 38 per cent of Horizon’s hospital beds are taken up by patients who need to move to long-term care, but there aren’t enough spaces for them,” the CBC observed.

“This is the reality we live with every day, and it continues to place our health-care teams and resources under immense strain, hampering our ability to deliver the kind of care the people of this province deserve,” Melanson noted.

The CEO noted that, in anticipation of greater demand, Horizon is adding dozens of hospital beds throughout the province and expanding “mental health services … to redirect some patients from emergency rooms.”

Horizon also appeared to be pressuring individual doctors’ offices to open for more hours to divert patients from hospitals.

“There’s been conversations with numbers of physician offices encouraging them to be open for certain days or hours over the holiday period to care for their own patients as well,” Melanson told the CBC. “I would say we have certainly followed up following last year and planned far more diligently.”

Extended doctor wait times have become a growing problem in Canada throughout the past two decades, exacerbated under radical leftist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. A study published this month by the Frasier Institute found that the average wait time to see a specialist in Canada in 2023, after being referred to by a general practitioner, was 30 weeks, 222 percent longer than “the 9.3 weeks Canadian patients could expect to wait in 1993” and a record for the study.

“After seeing a specialist, Canadian patients waited 6.3 weeks longer than what physicians consider to be clinically reasonable (8.6 weeks),” the Institute observed. “Patients also suffered considerable delays for diagnostic technology: 8.1 weeks for CT scans, 16.2 weeks for MRI scans, and 5.2 weeks for Ultrasound.”

While not all extended delays lead to severe medical consequences for patients, some research suggested that many may even create fatal situations. The Canadian healthcare news outlet Healthing noted last week that the think tank Second Street found thousands of Canadians dying while their names were on waitlists for various medical services.

“The data, which was conducted to reflect a year-long period between 2022 and 2023, showed that 17,032 patients died,” Healthing reported, “while their names sat on a waitlist for life-saving surgeries or life-altering procedures such as heart operations or hip replacements.”

“This data shows that the number of waiting list deaths has increased by nearly 67 per cent in the last five years, and between 2022 and 2023, it rose by 30 per cent,” it added.