One in 10 Canadian emergency room doctors are exiting the profession, with many reporting feeling that “the future of emergency medicine was hopeless.”
A Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) study released Monday states that Canadian emergency doctors feel the industry is “broken” and has “no possibility of recovery.”
“Respondents pointed to a broken health care system, unrealistic societal expectations, and insurmountable workplace challenges as reasons for burnout,” the study states. “The consequences were physician distress and leaving the profession. Mechanisms to continue in emergency medicine were reducing work hours, modifying work roles, and changing health care institutions
Out of 410 respondents, 41 said they left emergency medicine — 25 shifted to a different area of practice, 10 retired and six left clinical medicine, meaning they stopped treating patients altogether
Also, out of 351 remaining doctors who completed the full survey, 163 of them (46 per cent) scored high on emotional exhaustion and 193 (55 per cent) scored high on depersonalization, a state in which “an individual perceives or experiences a sensation of unreality concerning the self or the environment.”
Nearly half of survey respondents also reported reducing clinical hours, while 20 per cent have reported taking time off
Dr. Catherine Varner, emergency physician and deputy editor at CAMJ, said what is most worrisome about the findings is that emergency health-care workers“felt not only could they not provide the standards of care, but they felt without any ability to do anything about it.”
“They felt that the systems that they were working in were unable to change.”
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In particular, both younger and female participants were noted to experience higher volumes of burnout, a cause of concern that is growing in Canadian health care
“The younger members of our profession were also expressing desire to leave and when we don’t have the number of people coming into the field matching the number of people leaving the field, that’s when you [have] the emergency department closures and shifts being unable to be filled and beds in an emergency department being unable to be opened,” Varner said.
“I would rate them [emergency departments] in a situation that sometimes we can feel is like a crisis.”
As a result, those positions can become harder to replace or fill
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“It’s a huge threat to the workforce,” says Dr. Kerstin de Witt, professor in emergency medicine at Queen’s University
“If emergency physicians are leaving at the start of their profession, then we lose their entire career of working in the emergency department,” de Witt said
Wait times in emergency department skyrocketing
One in 10 patients — equaling around 180,000 people — who were admitted to an emergency department in Canada spent more than 48 hours waiting for an inpatient bed in 2024-25, according to a June Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) report
The data highlighted that many emergency departments across Canada “are facing challenges with overcrowding, staffing shortages, and limited bed and stretcher capacity that have not kept pace with growing demand.”
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Older adults and people with chronic conditions such as diabetes or high blood pressure are often in the emergency department the longest
There were 16.1 million visits to emergency departments across Canada in 2024-25 Twelve per cent of those visits resulted in hospital admission
Overcrowding was an issue mentioned throughout CAMJ’s study
“Many of the respondents reported that they were working in emergency departments that were continuously overcrowded, meaning that they didn’t have enough space to work because the departments had too many admitted patients in the care spaces of the emergency department,” she said
“They [felt] they were unable to provide the care that was needed, particularly if a critically ill patient came in. So, they were spending a lot of time having to do the logistics of figuring out where to see patients in a safe manner.”
A study released by the Ontario Medical Association on June 15 polled emergency room doctors across the province to build a snapshot of the struggling health-care system, reporting that the “health-care system is in profound crisis, with overwhelming consensus among emergency department physicians about the severity of challenges facing Ontario’s EDs [emergency departments].”
Roughly 15 per cent of the emergency room physicians in Ontario responded to the survey — with the vast majority of those polled reporting issues
Seventy-four per cent of those who answered said overcrowding was either severe or critical, while 76 per cent said overcrowding affected their ability to provide timely care “on most shifts or nearly every shift.”
