'Helplessness and resignation': Many doctors reducing hours
Canada's healthcare system is not immune to a workforce mental-health crisis, as emergency physicians leave the profession in growing numbers, according to a recent report.
Currently, Canada's emergency departments are losing physicians at a pace that threatens employers' ability to get injured or ill workers timely emergency care, according to an article published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ).
Overall, 10% of emergency physicians who had been surveyed five years earlier no longer practised emergency medicine, while an additional 48% had reduced their hours, noted author Catherine Varner, Deputy editor, CMAJ.
Varner writes that physicians also reported high levels of burnout and depersonalization that do not appear to have resolved following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The editorial also references a separate Canadian Institute for Health Information report showing that emergency department length of stay for admitted patients worsened again in 2025, with 7.7% of patients leaving without being seen by a physician.
“Emergency physicians described helplessness and resignation while working in overcrowded emergency departments,” writes Varner. “This research finds that respondents are unable to provide timely or safe care to patients in waiting rooms and hallways, unable to change the system in which they are working, and consequently are deciding to leave emergency medicine or decrease their shifts.”
Overall, nearly two-thirds (62%) of professionals across Canada are burned out — a trend that threatens retention, productivity and long-term organisational health, according to a previous report.
Individual providers facing public blame
On top of the workload challenge, emergency physicians and nurses are also frequently blamed directly when adverse outcomes occur, and are often publicly named in provincial inquiries into patient deaths in emergency department waiting rooms, Varner writes.
She points to two cases as examples of this pattern: the deaths of Prashant Sreekumar in Edmonton and Adam Burgoyne in Montréal. Varner writes that both cases resulted in extensive social media discussions about health care providers and criticism of their clinical decision-making.
Varner contrasts this response with coverage of a March 2026 collision between an Air Canada flight and a fire truck at LaGuardia Airport, in which the plane's captain and first officer were killed. She writes that air traffic controllers were not publicly named, and the media were swift to acknowledge the many system-level events that precipitated this tragic occurrence.
“Health care system leaders must not use individuals as convenient human shields to avoid taking accountability for a complex system problem,” she writes.
Ontario hospitals are eliminating positions and leaving vacancies unfilled as more than 70% of facilities in the province forecast budget deficits despite a recent funding increase, according to a report released earlier this year.
Hospital capacity as root cause
Varner writes that emergency department overcrowding is often blamed on patients seeking care for low-acuity visits or on poor access to primary care, but that the main cause is hospitals running at or over capacity, leaving admitted patients boarding in emergency departments.
“Persistent misinformation about drivers of overcrowding leads to governments and hospital systems focusing on and funding mechanisms to divert low-acuity visits, such as expanding the scope of practice for pharmacists, investing in virtual urgent care programs, and encouraging telephone medical advisory services. Although these programs are important for solving other problems in the health care system, they have clearly not ameliorated emergency department overcrowding, as emergency department lengths of stay have increased and associated adverse outcomes are not being prevented,” she notes.
“Because an ever-higher proportion of emergency department patients, with increasing medical complexity, require admission to hospital, emergency departments and hospitals are likely to remain in crisis now and for the foreseeable future until solutions target the root cause.”
Varner calls for the federal government to attach conditions to Canada Health Transfer negotiations requiring provinces to report emergency department wait-time data. She notes that submission of emergency department data to the National Ambulatory Care Reporting System is not currently mandated in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Quebec, Manitoba, or Saskatchewan.
ER nurses have also been victims of violence from patients, according to previous reports.
