Emergency doctors are leaving or reducing hours in face of ‘hopeless’ ER crisis: survey

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Some doctors scored high on both measures, and rates were highest among women and young doctors.

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Half who filled out the survey had reduced the number of shifts they’re working to allow time to recover between shifts; 20 per cent had taken time off work.

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“The prevailing theme was that the health care system is broken,” de Wit and her co-authors wrote in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

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“We found repeated references to the emergency department making up for system inadequacies, with fewer resources and little support, and the expectation that the situation will worsen.”

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“There is an overriding sentiment that everybody is looking for a way to leave the emergency department,” de Wit said.

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The health-care system “continues to be brutal. Under resourced. Under supported. No end in sight,” one survey doctor commented.

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Others commented on a lack of accountability at every level of health care. “Anger was directed toward hospital and political leaders, and occasionally toward patients,” the researchers said.

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Some doctors complained they’re being expected to manage non-urgent conditions “day or night.” Some said patients blame them for long waits for diagnostic scans, excessive waits to see a specialist and other systemic problems they have no control over, “which was demoralizing,” the research team wrote.

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Others said the health-care system was “destroying” them.

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Doctors described what they’re doing to make their job bearable, Wit said: “There was a detachment. There was a certain degree of acceptance of the dismal care they were giving.” Some focused on what they could control.

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Overall, the findings point to a system “that feels no longer functional” and is threatening patient safety, the researchers wrote. Physician burnout increases the risk of medical errors, misdiagnoses, and rash decision-making.

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Excessive waits for emergency care have led to tragic and disastrous outcomes. In December, a 44-year-old Edmonton father of three, Prashant Sreekumar, died after collapsing in an emergency room after waiting more than eight hours to be seen for chest pain. In March 2025, 39-year-old Adam Burgoyne of Montreal died of an aortic dissection after giving up on a six-hour wait for emergency care.

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Emergency doctors and nurses are “frequently blamed directly,” and often publicly named in inquiries into patient deaths in emergency waiting rooms, a “trial by social media” that should stop, Dr. Catherine Varner, an emergency physician and deputy editor of the CMAJ wrote in a related editorial.

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“Consider the stark contrast with the communications on, and inquiry into, the tragic collision of an Air Canada flight with a fire truck on the runway at LaGuardia Airport” in March, Varner wrote.

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The two pilots were killed and a dozen passengers injured when the jet slammed into a Port Authority fire truck while landing at the New York airport.

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“Yet, air traffic controllers were not publicly named, and the media were swift to acknowledge the many system-level events that precipitated this tragic occurrence,” Varner wrote.

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“Health care system leaders must not use individuals as convenient shields to avoid taking accountability for a complex system problem.”

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Varner said the federal government needs to take “more deliberate action” and, instead of unconditional health transfers, tie conditions to the money and require provinces to report data on ER wait times and access to care.

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The problems hammering emergency departments are numerous and decades old, including poor access to primary care, insufficient long-term and home care for people in hospitals who no longer need to be there but can’t be discharged because there’s nowhere else for them to go, a chronic shortage of hospital beds on the wards and drawn-out waits for specialist care.