‘I might as well die at home’: More Maritimers leave ERs without treatment, study shows

A new study found that more Maritimers are leaving ERs without seeing a physician.

Peter Phillips says he was struggling with pain in his chest. The Moncton resident had undergone quadruple bypass surgery in Saint John, N.B., months earlier, and had felt the pain on and off ever since.

He went to the Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital emergency department and six hours later, he left. While he had blood work done, he says no one could tell him when he might see a physician.

“You think, well, you know, if I’m going to die, I might as well die at home. Why would I die in a hard chair in a waiting room, right?” he said.

His experience illustrates what the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) found after asking every province for the number of patients who went to an emergency room seeking help and left before getting treatment.

The study found the proportion of people in that situation is higher in the Maritimes than the national average.

In Nova Scotia, 9.84 per cent of patients who attended an ER in 2024 left without receiving treatment.

New Brunswick saw 12.85 per cent – and the highest was in Prince Edward Island, where 14.15 per cent of people left untreated.

The national average is 7.78 per cent.

But MEI’s research also found that more than half of the patients leaving an ER in Nova Scotia were triaged as level two or level three, which means they were in “urgent” or “very urgent” need of medical attention.

In New Brunswick and P.E.I., most of the patients who left were classified as level four or five, considered “semi-urgent” or “non-urgent.”

“For example, it could be someone with a controlled bleeding that needs stitching, or it could be someone in need of prescription renewal,” said Samantha Dagres, communications manager at MEI. “The latter case is quite common. We did a study a while ago and found that…10 per cent of all ER visits are related to a prescription renewal. They’re showing up to emergency rooms because it’s a last resort.”

Dagres says MEI suggests looking to France, where physicians established “immediate care centres” to treat patients who would be considered level three – cases that are non-life threatening but still needing urgent treatment.

“We would love to see it, especially in provinces where we’re seeing P3 cases go up. In Nova Scotia, it’s nearly half of folks leaving the emergency room who are technically under that urgent care. So that’s pretty severe,” she said.

Nova Scotia Health Minister Michelle Thompson responded to the numbers Thursday, saying there’s always been a portion of the population who leave an E.R. because of the wait times.

“It’s been ever thus in my career,” she said.

She says the province is finding ways for patients to get treatment outside and inside the emergency department, like virtual urgent care and primary care options in communities.

But they’re also trying to treat more people as they wait in an E.R., she says.

“You can still perhaps have blood work, you can still perhaps have a cardiogram and still maybe have some diagnostic imaging if that’s required,” she said. “So your treatment can actually start in the waiting room.”

Phillips says he wasn’t the only one who left the ER that day. He started an online group for New Brunswickers to share their health-care stories in the hope they feel less alone.

“Because we shouldn’t accept that. We’re throwing millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money at a system that should be a little more accountable to us. People are dying and it’s sad,” he said.

Dagres clarified that New Brunswick’s data only included numbers provided by Horizon Health Network. While Vitalité Health Network did provide some information, it wasn’t exactly what the Institute had asked for, she said.