One in 10 Canadian Emergency Patients Spent Over 14 Hours in ER During 2024-25
Emergency departments across Canada are under mounting pressure, with a new report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) revealing that approximately one in 10 emergency department patients — roughly 1.5 million people — spent more than 14 hours in the ER during the 2024-25 fiscal year.
The findings paint a picture of a system struggling to keep pace with growing demand, and they highlight the need for patients to understand how emergency care is being delivered and where bottlenecks are forming.
Hospitalized Patients Face the Longest Waits
The CIHI study found that patients who required hospitalization experienced the most significant delays. About one in 10 admitted patients — equivalent to approximately 180,000 individuals — waited more than 48 hours in the emergency department before receiving an inpatient bed.
The report noted that symptoms of an overwhelmed system are often evident in the emergency department, with wait times driven by both the increasing complexity of patient needs and a system under considerable strain from rising demand.
Overall Wait Times Remain a Concern
Beyond the most extreme cases, the data revealed broader challenges in emergency care access. In 2024-2025, half of all emergency department patients in Canada waited nearly two hours before being seen by an ED physician. One in 10 patients waited more than six hours for initial assessment.
Approximately 66% of emergency department visits during this period involved patients requiring immediate or urgent medical attention. This represents an increase of seven percentage points compared to 2018-19, or roughly 1.7 million additional urgent visits — a sharp rise that underscores the growing pressure on frontline services.
Complex Cases and Aging Populations Drive Demand
Nearly a third of emergency department visits involved patients with multiple comorbidities, meaning more complex assessment, testing, and care coordination were required. Adults aged 55 and over accounted for a significant share of emergency room visits, and while part of this trend reflects Canada’s aging population, it also points to gaps in access to primary and community health care.
People living in the lowest-income neighborhoods represented nearly half of all emergency department visits. These patients often face greater barriers to accessing routine community care and rely on the emergency department to fill that gap — a dynamic that further intensifies demand on ER resources.
“A National Health Care Crisis”
Dr. Paul Parks, an emergency room physician in Medicine Hat, Alberta, described the situation unfolding in emergency departments across the country as a national health care crisis.
“We have optimized everything,” Parks said in a statement. “We have taken all the elasticity out of the system, but the tap is still flowing. There is a crisis: inadequate connected community resources and little ongoing and long-term care.”
His comments reflect a widely recognized challenge within the Canadian health care system — even when hospitals operate at peak efficiency, the lack of available community-based care options creates bottlenecks that emergency departments cannot resolve on their own.
Discharge Delays and Long-Term Care Backlogs
While most patients admitted to acute care through the emergency department were discharged within four days on average, about 114,000 patients remained in hospital significantly longer because they required additional support. Among those waiting for placement in long-term care, half had to wait in a hospital bed for up to 44 days.
These patients, classified as needing an alternative level of care, are medically ready for discharge but remain hospitalized due to a lack of available long-term care or home care placements. On average, they occupied hospital beds for 44 days — beds that could otherwise be used for incoming emergency patients.
The issue illustrates how delays in one part of the health care system cascade into others, with emergency rooms effectively serving as a buffer for broader systemic gaps.
