Canadian doctors say they’re losing 20 million hours a year to unnecessary paperwork

Dr. Natasha Aziz sees patients all day, returns home to her two small children, then comes back to work the next morning before the sun rises to climb an endless mountain of red tape.

“The paperwork just seems to never sleep. Like, every morning you wake up, there’s dozens of things in your inbox,” said Aziz, a family physician in Ontario’s Durham Region.

She added, “even when you’re with the patient, the task of looking after the patient gets sidelined because you have to do some kind of documentation task,” such as filling out insurance or government forms.

Aziz is not alone. Doctors in Canada each spend, on average, nine hours per week on administrative tasks, totaling 42.7 million hours annually across the country, according to a new report from the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, which surveyed 1,924 physicians.

Nearly half of this work (47 per cent) is spent on tasks physicians see as unnecessary red tape, rather than work that’s critical to caring for their patients.

“It’s a burden. It’s taking a toll on physicians, and it is really red tape disease,” CMA president Dr. Margot Burnell, an oncologist, told As It Happens host Nil KÓ§ksal.

The brunt of this work, the report found, falls on family physicians, of which there is already a shortage. 

Because of this burden, the report found doctors are taking on fewer patients, or moving away from family practice into fields with less administrative toll. A quarter of doctors said they were considering retiring early, or quitting altogether.

This, in turn, translates to long wait times, emergency room closures, and one in five Canadians who don’t have a family doctor. 

Meanwhile, 44 per cent of doctors said that if they had less paperwork, they would spend more time with their existing patients, while 43 per cent said they’d take on new ones. 

“So by decreasing the admin burden, everybody wins,” Burnell said. “The physician wins, the patients win, and the health-care system wins.”

The paperwork that fills Aziz’s mornings goes far beyond requisitioning tests and looking over lab work, the kind of things she says any doctor would expect to do.

It’s tracking down patient information that’s spread out over multiple systems. It’s resubmitting the exact same information multiple times because each pharmacy or clinic has its own specific forms.

Digitization isn’t necessarily helping either, she said, because, oftentimes, the software that should be making things easier just isn’t up to par.

“Sometimes it’s one step forward, two steps back,” she said. “You have to click a dozen boxes and then the patient’s history won’t populate because it has a dash, which is not an allowed character, you know?”

But her biggest pet peeve? Filling out unnecessarily complex forms at the behest of insurance companies and employers.

“Every day we have patients that bring forms that they don’t want done, we don’t want done, but their employer wants done,” she said.

That work isn’t covered by provincial health insurance, she said, so the patient eats the cost. It’s something she’d desperately like to see changed, ideally through legislation.

“Any time a third party wants a form done by a physician, the third party should be paying for the form,” she said. “I think we would overnight see a dramatic drop in those requests.”

The report also makes several recommendations for reducing administrative burden on doctors. 

They include getting rid of sick notes, implementing AI scribes in doctors’ offices to provide summaries of care, simplifying and streamlining insurance and tax forms, delegating duties to other health professionals, and providing paid time do administrative work, so doctors aren’t doing it on their own time.

Burnell says the CMA is already working with stakeholders to implement some of these changes.

Several provinces have passed legislation limiting when employers can demand sick notes. Many heath-care clinics are using AI scribes, often in government pilot programs to test accuracy and cybersecurity.

The CMA is working with the CRA to simplify paperwork for the Canada Pension Plan Disability and the Disability Tax Credit and — two forms doctors identified as the most notoriously difficult and time-consuming. The latter is 15 pages long, and can’t be submitted by email.

“We are making progress,” Burnell said.

Dr. Ajantha Jayabarathan, a family doctor in Halifax, has seen that progress first hand.

Nova Scotia began implementing its red tape reduction pan for health care in 2021, and as of 2025, the government says it has reduced 435,000 hours of red tape for physicians. 

“I think we were quite ahead of the curve when it was identified that this was a major problem,” Jayabarathan said.

Sick notes are now handled by case workers, referrals are no longer needed for physiotherapy, and pharmacare and requisition forms have been centralized, Jayabarathan said.

“I have a sense of relief that once, for example, if it is a referral for surgery or a referral of MRI or ultrasound, I know I’ve done due diligence, I’ve indicated the urgency level, it’s gone to a central repository and somebody is managing it,” she said.

“Whereas in the past, we would send it and it would be this dark abyss and we’d never know if the note landed, and if we heard back, it was a miracle.”

But the thing that’s made the biggest difference in her day-to-day, she says, is the use of AI scribes. With a patient’s consent, the software records appointments and generates summaries, which patients can take home or bring to other health-care professionals.

“It really has revolutionized what I’m able to do with patients,” Jayabarathan said. “Patients have been over the moon about it.”

AI tools are prone to errors, however, and both Burnell and Jayabarathan say they require human oversight. 

Jayabarathan is optimistic about her province’s future, and encourages other provinces to follow their blueprint. 

“We’re doing some remarkable things,” she said. “And within the next two to three years we’re going to see quite a turnaround in the health system itself.”