Dr. Kaitlin Stockton has watched far too many patients suffer in overflowing emergency departments.
The Vancouver-based physician has given patients she just met a cancer diagnosis, with little privacy in the middle of a noisy room. She’s cared for a man with an intracranial brain bleed on an ambulance stretcher in a hallway. And she can’t shake the memory of one patient who had septic shock after spending eight hours in a waiting room, dangerously close to death.
Those kinds of harrowing experiences take a toll on emergency physicians, Stockton said, and there have been too many to count. At least five of her colleagues have left in the last few years.
Now, a new national survey shows the problem goes beyond any one hospital or province.
One out of every 10 emergency physicians in Canada have left their specialty, while the vast majority of others are reducing their hours or taking time off to manage burnout, the results suggest.
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The findings, part of a study out Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, are based on a 2025 cross-country survey of hundreds of emergency medicine doctors.
“The prevailing theme was that the [health-care] system is broken,” wrote co-author Dr. Kerstin de Wit, an emergency physician at Kingston Health Sciences Centre and professor at Queen’s University, who conducted the research with the Network of Canadian Emergency Researchers.
Nearly half of survey respondents said they’ve reduced their clinical hours, while 20 per cent have taken time off and 10 per cent have left the specialty, the researchers found, with women and younger physicians reporting higher rates of burnout.
High levels of physician burnout can lead to lower-quality care and put patient safety at risk, the researchers concluded, and shouldn’t be considered just a “pandemic phenomenon.”
The results were based on an online survey of more than 400 doctors, with respondents from every province and territory except Nunavut and Yukon.
There aren’t hard numbers on the total workforce of emergency physicians currently working in Canada.
The most recent data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) shows there were roughly 2,250 emergency family medicine physicians and close to 1,500 emergency medicine physicians across Canada as of 2024.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP) estimates there may be roughly 6,000 — although neither figures take into account how many of those individuals are actually working regular hours in ERs.
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Stockton, who is also a spokesperson for CAEP, isn’t surprised by the new survey results, saying it’s “demoralizing” for doctors to witness patient harm and voice their concerns, yet never see any changes.
“We’re seeing this alarming exodus of health-care workers across the country,” she said.
“And these are not people that are nearing retirement. These are people that are three, five, 10 years out from school that are leaving emergency medicine, leaving hospital-based medicine or actually leaving medicine altogether — because they can no longer sustain this job and still maintain their own well-being.”
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The loss of emergency physicians marks a “crisis for the Canadian system,” noted the authors of the new CMAJ paper.
The survey results come at a time when millions of Canadians lack access to a primary-care provider and emergency departments are grappling with chronic overcrowding and staff shortages.
In 2024, a CBC News investigation found one in every five hospitals in Ontario with an emergency room or urgent care centre had an unplanned shutdown that year, despite those kinds of closures being rare prior to the pandemic.
Wait times are getting worse as well.
One in every 10 Canadians admitted to hospital during the 2024-25 fiscal year spent more than 48 hours waiting in the emergency department — a 12-hour increase from six years prior — according to a recent report from CIHI, which put the blame on limited capacity, difficulties in accessing standard care and the country’s aging population.
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Dr. James Maskalyk, a Toronto-based emergency physician, said the findings echo his own experience watching colleagues feel increasingly alone within an “overburdened health system.”
“If you look at the reasons why people leave the profession, organizational issues are the biggest ones…. At the level of the doctor-patient relationship, we feel like we’re letting people down.”
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To address this crisis, governments and institutions need to close gaps in patient care, invest in specialized geriatric emergency care for Canadian seniors and expand staffing to tackle patient needs beyond the ER, say the CMAJ study’s authors.
Various levels of government have invested in new approaches to emergency care in recent years. In Ontario, for instance, health-care professions such as pharmacists and paramedics have gained broader scope to treat some patients in community settings instead of in the ER, while B.C. has rolled out dozens of new urgent and primary care centres to relieve pressure on crowded ERs.
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Health-care discussions also played out at the national level last week as all 13 of the country’s premiers gathered in Charlottetown.
In a joint statement, the group called for more predictable health-care funding from the federal government.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Medical Association — the advocacy group representing all Canadian doctors — called on the premiers themselves to solve the problems plaguing hospitals, “including another summer of ER closures,” and praised efforts to break down barriers preventing clinicians from working across provincial borders.
Maskalyk stressed that while hospital-based efforts such as peer support programs and ample rest for health-care workers can help them avoid burnout, the fact remains that broader systemic issues are at the root of why many physicians leave.
“The feeling that we’re being shortchanged in our ability to do what we love, and we aren’t giving patients what they need — that’s where this attrition is coming from,” he said.
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More transparency on hospital metrics, as well as accountability all the way up to the provincial and federal governments, is needed to tackle the dangerous wait times and overcrowding so many ER physicians now witness, Stockton said.
“Over time, it just breaks you.”
