Canadian ERs keep closing this summer — but there's no easy fix

This story is part of CBC Health's Second Opinion, a weekly analysis of health and medical science news emailed to subscribers on Saturday mornings. If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.

In mid-July, when Doug Moore's daughter fell and hurt her wrist at the family's property in northern B.C., he rushed the nine-year-old to the nearest hospital — only to find the emergency department had shut down. 

There was no advance notice of the closure, the Fort St. John resident recently told CBC's Daybreak North.

"When you've got a nine-year-old, and it's 9:30 at night, and she's tired, she's in pain ... it definitely makes me nervous for my family and for those around us," he said.

Northern B.C. has been hit hard by emergency closures again this summer. Between July 22 to July 28, there was at least one ER service interruption per day in the northern half of the province, prompting rallies in parts of the region. 

The ER at the largest hospital in the area — serving nearly 30,000 residents — was shuttered five times in just one week. 

But the crisis is also playing out country-wide, with no clear solutions in sight.

"There continue to be just unprecedented numbers of emergency department closures," said Natalie Mehra, executive director of the Ontario Health Coalition, an advocacy group that released last year's headline-making tally of shutdowns in the province.

That 2023 report found there were close to 870 emergency department closures across Ontario that year — an all-time high — and Mehra said her team's early data for 2024 shows a similar trend. 

"Up until a few years ago," she said, "we'd never seen anything like that."

Parts of Alberta, Quebec, P.E.I. and beyond are also reporting ER closures, and they're usually linked to staff shortages. This persistent issue is prompting a flurry of potential remedies, from extensions to locum programs meant to bring in temporary staff, to virtual ERs that combine online assessments with in-person patient care. 

Yet many medical experts warn constant closures of Canadian emergency departments are merely a symptom of bigger issues throughout the country's strained health-care system, and won't be an easy fix.

"It's just getting to a tipping point where you just don't have enough people willing and able to provide the coverage anymore," said Dr. Gord McInnes, president of the emergency medicine section for the Doctors of BC, a voluntary medical association representing physicians and medical students.

On one hand, the problems plaguing ERs across the country mainly come down to simple supply and demand: There's a constant influx of patients seeking care, and — particularly after the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic — an ongoing shortage of health-care professionals available.