Patients, workers push for Ontario election to focus on long ER waits
Ontario Hospital Association hoping for ‘solutions-oriented’ debate that avoids ‘hysterics’
Twenty hours waiting in the emergency room wasn't unusual for Brodie Houlette.
After the 39-year-old financial services worker contracted a heart infection in 2022, he spent months in and out of a Toronto hospital ER, waiting first for a diagnosis, then more tests, and then for admission and treatment.
Two years later, and the experience has left a profound impression on him.
"It was a wait in emergency rooms of 14,16, 20 hours," he said.
"You'd be sleeping in a bay as you waited for a room to come up … It was a disaster."
Houlette says he's paying close attention to this provincial election and wants fixing ER waits and closures to become a prominent ballot box question.
He says his experience made it clear that staffing shortages and space constraints in Ontario hospitals require urgent attention from politicians of all party stripes.
"Trump has unfortunately changed the reality of this election, from an election on health care, which is what it should be, to an election on Trump," he said. "But for average people, the system is just not working."
Post-pandemic Ontario has been grappling with long waits in many hospital emergency rooms provincewide, and some rural ER closures due to staffing shortages overnight and over the weekends.
CBC News analysis in late 2024 found that over the past three years, at least 38 Ontario hospitals with emergency rooms or urgent care centres (UCCs) have experienced closures — about one in five of 176 publicly funded facilities.
Houlette is far from the only voice hoping crowded hospital ERs gain more prominence as a campaign issue. Cracks in the current health-care system were amplified coming out of the pandemic, said emergency physician Dr. Andrew Park, and that has had an impact on ER waits.
"Our patients are much more complex, they're much sicker," he said. "Their needs are higher, psychologically, physically, and so we're having a difficult time keeping up with that demand ... The waits get longer, tensions rise"
Part of the solution is to ensure patients have access to primary care, said Park, who is past-president of the Ontario Medical Association. If someone has a family doctor, they're less likely to go to an emergency room for basic care, he said.
"We want to see governments commit to getting every single person a doctor, so that patients aren't using emergency departments because they don't have any other choice," he said.
"We want to see that real commitment — both in dollars, as well as in policy."
Nurses' union calls for better working conditions
Waits like Houlette experienced are not unusual, said Erin Ariss, president of the Ontario Nurses' Association — and a lack of staffing is a major contributor.
The province needs thousands more nurses in the hospital system, including ERs, to help provide proper patient care, Ariss said. She describes the state of the province's emergency rooms as "absolute chaos."
"Nurses are working short-handed and in dangerous, chaotic situations, and it's completely avoidable and unacceptable," Ariss said.
The union is currently bargaining for a new contract with the province, and she says Ontario needs to make working in the hospital sector more attractive by increasing wages and improving working conditions.
"I would think that actually it would be a savings," she said. "You have a number of nurses out there who are just no longer interested in working in the environment."
Ontario making progress: OHA president
Demand from the province's growing and aging population is also contributing to long ER waits, said Anthony Dale, president of the Ontario Hospital Association.
But the government and its hospitals are working to address and prevent weekend and overnight ER closures, he said, which includes improving nursing pay and working conditions.
"We feel we're making quite significant progress," Dale said.
Although … one (closure) is still too many," he said there have been fewer ER closures, the vacancy rate among registered nurses has dropped, and "we're seeing far fewer younger nurses leaving their practice."
Dale said he's hopeful that rhetoric around the issue on the campaign trail can be "solutions-oriented."
"We look at the public debate and it at times verges on hysterics — that's not doing a thing to bolster or improve public confidence in the system," he said.
Party promises so far
Thus far on the campaign trail, health-care promises have focused on recruiting more doctors and nurses.
Two days before the election, the PCs announced a plan to spend $1.9 billion to help connect two million patients to primary care by 2029. They also say they've moved ahead with 50 new hospital redevelopments, built 3,500 new beds across the province since 2018 and spent $44 million to tackle ER wait times.
Meanwhile, the Liberals have promised to spend $3 billion to provide a family doctor for everyone in the province within the next four years.
The NDP has promised to spend $4 billion to connect every Ontarian to a family doctor or nurse practitioner by focusing on building up the team-based primary care model, and the Green Party has said it will hire more nurses, doctors and personal support workers in every region of Ontario.
For his part, Houllette says his message to all the parties is simple.
"Get serious, work together, and get this done," he said. "Get together in a room and figure out a 20 year plan to get health care back on track."