Canadians are dying in emergency rooms as wait times climb to 48 hours - National Post

Half of emergency patients spent four hours or less there, from the time they were registered or triaged to the time they left; 40% spent five to 14 hours, and one in 10 spent over 14 hours, an increase of 28% over 2018-19. Photo by Montreal Gazette/Postmedia/FileArticle contentHundreds of thousands of sick and injured Canadians are spending up to two days or longer parked on hard stretchers or plastic chairs in the country’s swamped emergency departments, waiting for a scarce bed to open upstairs, and these delays can be deadly.

New data show that, in 2024-2025, one in 10 emergency patients — 1.5 million people — spent more than 14 hours in emergency.

Of the 16.1 million ER visits reported in total, 1.8 million people needed to be admitted to hospital.

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While half waited less than five hours for a bed after the decision was made to admit them, one in 10, or 180,000 people, languished 48 hours or more in emergency before they were moved to a ward bed or the operating room.

Studies have shown that for every 82 people waiting more than six to eight hours to be transferred to a bed, one additional death will occur, meaning that “for those 180,000 patients waiting more than two days for an inpatient bed, we could expect 2,195 attributable deaths,” said Ottawa emergency physician Dr. Michael Herman.

“This is not just inconvenient for patients, this is lethal.”

The new report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information validates “what we’ve been saying on the frontline for years now,” said Herman, a director on the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians’ board of directors.

People are landing in emergency sicker, many with multiple underlying health problems in addition to whatever brought them to hospital, and staying longer.

Two-thirds are being triaged as “high acuity,” meaning with conditions that are either life-threatening, such as cardiac arrest, or require rapid medical attention (severe chest pains, signs of sepsis, severely abnormal vital signs) —  shooting down the “zombie myth that refuses to die” that waits times are being driven up by people with minor complaints, Herman said.