One in 10 patients in Canadian emergency departments spent more than 14 hours waiting for care, according to a new report [1].

The findings highlight a systemic failure in the healthcare pipeline, where delays in emergency rooms are symptoms of broader shortages in long-term care and home-care services.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) released the data covering the 2024-2025 reporting period [1]. The report indicates that 10% of patients faced waits exceeding 14 hours [1]. In some extreme cases, nearly 200,000 emergency patients waited 48 hours or more for a bed during the previous year [2].

These wait times are driven by limited emergency-room capacity and significant backlogs in other sectors of the health system [3]. The report notes that an increase in medically complex patients seeking care has further strained available resources [4].

Dr. Michael Herman, a spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, said the current crisis in emergency departments is often a reflection of the inability to move patients out of the ER and into appropriate long-term or home-care settings [3].

When patients cannot be transferred to a bed in a specialized ward or a long-term care facility, they remain in the emergency department. This creates a bottleneck that prevents new patients from being seen in a timely manner, a cycle that exacerbates the 14-hour wait times reported by CIHI [1].

The report underscores a growing gap between the needs of an aging, medically complex population and the available infrastructure to support them [4].

“One in 10 patients in Canadian emergency departments spent more than 14 hours waiting for care.”

The data suggests that emergency room wait times are not merely a failure of hospital staffing, but a 'downstream' problem. Because long-term care and home-care services are backlogged, hospitals cannot discharge patients, which freezes the flow of the entire system. This creates a critical bottleneck where the ER becomes a holding area for patients who no longer require acute emergency care but have nowhere else to go.