Nearly 300K people left Ontario emergency rooms without treatment last year but the situation was worse in other parts of Canada: report

Among the many features of The Peter Gilgan Mississauga Hospital/Shah Family Hospital for Women and Children is a new and expanded Emergency Department. (Trillium Health Partners)

Nearly 300,000 Ontarians left an emergency room without getting treatment in the last year but the situation was even more grim in other Canadian provinces, a new report has found.

According to the report published Thursday by the public policy think tank MEI, the number of people who left Ontario’s emergency rooms without being treated in 2024 was 292,695.

That translated into roughly 4.9 per cent of the nearly six million emergency room visits recorded in Ontario in 2024.

The proportion of Ontarians who left an emergency room without getting treatment was actually the lowest among the nine Canadian provinces studied (data was not available for Saskatchewan).

Prince Edward Island had the highest proportion of patients leaving emergency rooms without receiving treatment at 14.15 per cent. Manitoba was next on the list at 13.23 per cent followed by New Brunswick at 12.85 per cent.

The report said Canada recorded 16.3 million emergency room visits in the last year, out of which 1,267,736 patients (7.8 per cent) were left untreated.

The number of people prematurely departing from Canadian emergency rooms was up by 35.6 per cent in last year.

Around 50 per cent of the people who leave without treatment are classified as P3 – non-life-threatening but still in need of urgent medical attention, the report said.

Renaud Brossard, vice president of communications at the MEI, said in a press release that thousands of people in the province are being denied healthcare every year due to the failure of the system.

“This is particularly troubling as it means patients are sent back to the waiting room despite a very real risk of deterioration,” Brossard said.

He added that patients who face delays in treatment or avoid it often end up suffering from worsening conditions leading to more complex consequences.

“Solving the crisis in primary care is essential if we want to keep patients from continuing to fall through the cracks,” Brossard said. “Policymakers must find the political courage to open up healthcare delivery to independent and alternative providers, or else this crisis is bound to get worse.”

To reduce the number of people who leave emergency rooms untreated, the report recommends addressing the problems people face accessing care, like alternatives to emergency rooms that could help ease the pressure on the hospital systems, which could help with managing the long wait times.

“This kind of approach would also help reduce the risk of patients leaving emergency rooms untreated, which can worsen their condition and then require the mobilization of even more resources from Canada’s healthcare systems,” the report said.