1 in 10 emergency medicine doctors in Canada left ERs amid reports of high burnout, study finds

It’s no secret that emergency rooms across Canada can often be slammed with patients seeking treatment, but a new study has found that one in 10 physicians have recently stopped working in emergency departments amid broader concerns about the state of the health care system.

The startling finding was revealed in a study published on Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Research began in April 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and three follow-up surveys were conducted in November 2020, September 2022, and January 2025.

“The prevailing theme was that the health care system is broken. 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,” the study authors wrote.

“For many, the future of emergency medicine was hopeless with no possibility of recovery. Participants commented on a lack of accountability at every level of health care institution. Anger was directed toward hospital and political leaders, and occasionally toward patients.”

Dr. Kerstin de Wit, a study co-author who works as an emergency department physician and is a Queen’s University professor, said the 2025 survey showed 10 per cent of respondents left the emergency medicine profession, 20 per cent took time away from emergency medicine, and nearly 50 per cent reduced clinical hours.

“I wasn’t very surprised because I see it every day in my own experiences of working shifts and among my colleagues,” she told CityNews, adding there have been high levels of burnout reported.

“We’re all working more shifts than we’re actually supposed to be doing because we’re always short of physicians and our nurses are always short of nurses. We’re frequently staying long past the end of our shift to try and see as many patients as we can.

“We’re feeling a lot of distress because we see patients who are really sick, often in the waiting room for up to maybe even 12 hours before we’re able to see them, and that distresses us greatly because we feel we’re not doing a good job and we’re not providing any help to these patients.”

Dr. Catherine Varner, a 15-year emergency room doctor and a deputy editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, penned an editorial in response to the study.

She said the past decade has been increasingly difficult for emergency departments across Canada, fuelled in part by COVID-19, and added she’s worried about a lack of replacement physicians coming down the pipeline.

“I worry that we’re going to continue to see things like waiting room deaths,” Varner said.

“We see that with the continued pressures on emergency departments and overcrowding, and with those types of events that are crushing to the emergency medicine community, I think we’ll see more and more people leave and patients suffer,” she added.

Dr. Mayoorendra Ravichandiran, the deputy chief of emergency medicine with the Scarborough Health Network, said he has worked in emergency rooms for 10 years. He said while the nature of the work is “rewarding,” it can be stressful. He said he read about the study’s findings.

“The emergency department often acts as the canary in the coal mine, and we often see the signs of a problem before the system actually experiences it,” he told CityNews.

“We don’t really have the option of slowing down, or if we’re bed-blocked doesn’t mean we can stop seeing new patients when the patients arrive. We still have to see them when there are limited beds … and we have to make space where we can.”

As a departmental leader, Ravichandiran said peer support has been important for colleagues experiencing stress — something he has seen a lot among younger employees.

CityNews contacted Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones’ office on Monday to ask about the study. A statement issued didn’t directly address the findings, but touted the level of public funding for the health-care system and that Ontario doctors have “the highest physician compensation in the country.”

“Over the past year, Ontario has achieved its lowest alternate-level-of-care rate in more than a decade, freeing up the equivalent capacity of two large community hospitals, while emergency department volumes have declined by nearly 200,000 visits as more people access care in the right setting,” spokesperson Lily Barnes wrote.

“Our $3.4-billion primary care action plan will further connect people to primary care and help reduce unnecessary emergency department visits while expanded scopes of practice for health-care professionals, including pharmacists, are improving access to care closer to home.”

The statement also called on the federal government to finalize “stable, predictable, and flexible long-term funding.”

During a rally by unionized workers outside Birchmount Hospital on Monday amid the potential for cuts as the Scarborough Health Network (SHN) struggles with the level of operational funding it receives from the Ford government, CityNews asked Ontario NDP leader Marit Stiles about the study’s findings.

“If the government was actually out there listening to health-care workers on the front line or listening to people out there, just here in Scarborough alone only one in six people has access to a family physician, right? People are showing up to our hospitals sicker than ever,” she said, echoing concerns about the potential for cuts at SHN

“This is no way to treat patients or to treat health-care workers; it has to end.”

A SHN spokesperson said staff are focused on “delivering high-quality, safe care” and that they have a “responsibility is to steward the resources we receive responsibly while meeting the needs of one of Ontario’s fastest-growing and increasingly complex populations.”

“SHN is aligning its clinical and service strategy with provincial priorities, including expanding access to care in the community, strengthening primary care, and improving transitions across the health system to better serve patients and families,” the statement said.

Varner said the latest data contradicts some of the Ontario government’s assertions, noting there are “longer waits in emergency departments, longer weeks of stay for admitted patients, and one in 13 patients were leaving without being seen by a physician.”

“While there are improving metrics around primary care, that is not enough to manage the overcrowding of emergency departments,” she said.

“We’ve shown that year over year despite investments in primary care, that affects other aspects of the health-care system but not the issue of overcrowding.

“Hospital overcrowding, and emergency department overcrowding, happens because of the amount of boarding that happens in hospitals and emergency departments [due to] not having enough space, and that’s not because someone with a sore throat is coming to the emergency department.”

All of the emergency physicians CityNews spoke with on Monday said a key piece to addressing the issues raised is freeing up, renovating and/or adding new space in Canada’s hospitals to provide better spaces to work in and treat patients. All three doctors had messages to share with decision-makers.

“We have the obligation and the opportunity to start addressing some of the systemic challenges that have been identified in this paper,” Ravichandiran said, adding SHN has tried to innovate its spaces and workflows to address some of the issues raised locally.

“Governments need to act now … address the access into the hospital, the bed-block problem that we have,” de Wit added.

Varner said while increasing capacity in hospitals and long-term care facilities is important, there are other measures like the federal government imposing conditions on new health-care funding that would require certain improvements.

She also called for added protections for emergency medicine physicians during coroner’s inquests, such as limiting the disclosure of doctors’ names in public documents. CityNews asked about concerns surrounding a lack of transparency surrounding such a move.

“When tragic events happen, when provincial inquests and inquiries occur, just about learning from those events to prevent them from happening in the future. We can do that just like the airline industry doe without naming individual providers because we don’t want a trial by social media,” Varner said.

“That is the type of event that can make an emergency provider seem scared to go to work the next day if they are going to be named because their emergency department was crowded as part of a provincial request.”