‘Agony’: Surrey patients leaving ER untreated due to long waits

It was getting close to midnight and Alice Wilson looked at her watch and sighed – and then grimaced in pain.

The senior citizen was sitting in the emergency room at Surrey Memorial Hospital and realized that it had been more than six hours of agony waiting to be treated for an intestinal issue.

“After a while, you start to wonder if you are ever going to be seen by someone,” Wilson said. “The staff do their best and you know they are under a lot of pressure, but at some point I started to lose my patience because I was in agony.”

After asking once again how long it would be – and being told it could be hours more – Wilson went home. She went back the next day and got lucky – getting in to see someone in under two hours.

But Wilson’s experience is happening more and more, according to a new report.

The number of patients leaving British Columbia’s emergency rooms without being treated is rising, reveals a report published by the group MEI.

“These patients are not leaving because they feel better, but because the system is failing them,” says Emmanuelle B. Faubert, economist at the MEI and author of the report. “Thousands of British Columbians are being denied access to care each year.”

In 2024, British Columbia recorded nearly 2.6 million emergency room visits. Of these, 142,961 ended with a patient leaving before receiving treatment, representing 5.5 per cent of all visits, said MEI, an independent public policy think tank.

This marks a worsening trend, with the ratio of patients leaving surging by 71.6 per cent since 2019.

Patients in British Columbia walk away from emergency rooms without receiving care at a rate that is lower than the national average of 7.8 per cent.

Fraser Health has tried to address this issue at Surrey’s hospital with its online tool to check on average wait times for the ER.

“We recognize that some patients and their loved ones are experiencing longer-than-usual emergency department wait times which can be frustrating and cause concern for loved ones,” says Fraser Health in a post on its website. “This new information about the emergency departments will help patients and families make informed decisions about accessing care. These estimates help demonstrate how long it may take to see a physician and the expected length of stay in the emergency department.”

Surrey Newton Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal introduced a Private Member’s Bill this week aimed at making provincial governments more accountable and transparent when it comes to how they spend federal health dollars, specifically with how that money is spent to provide “timely access to care,” according to his speech in the House of Commons.

The bill demands that provinces set “clear benchmarks” for reducing wait times in ERs and publish annual reports “so Canadians can see the results,” Dhaliwal said.

“Canadians deserve to know that every health dollar is making a difference in improving wait times,” he said.

Across Canada, 16.3 million emergency room visits were made last year, and 1,267,736 patients were left untreated—around one in every thirteen visits. This data doesn’t include patients living in Saskatchewan, or those covered by New Brunswick’s Vitalité Santé health network, those health authorities having both failed to provide the requested 2024 data in time for publication.

The deterioration is observed nationwide, as rates of premature departures have risen significantly since 2019. Last year, the number of Canadian patients leaving without treatment increased by 35.6 per cent.

Unlike most other provinces, British Columbia does not track the severity of cases leaving an emergency room untreated, despite many having gone through triage. This lack of data leaves policymakers and hospital administrators in the dark about where to focus efforts to diminish the number of patients leaving untreated.

The MEI researcher emphasized that patients forced to delay or forgo care often end up suffering from worsening conditions, which lead to more complex cases.

In a U.S. study conducted between 2019 and 2020, researchers found that 55 per cent of patients who left an emergency room before being treated ended up consulting a healthcare professional within three weeks of their initial visit.

The MEI recommends increasing access to upstream care, which includes:

• Increasing the use of specialized nurse practitioner clinics.
• Granting the broadest scope of practice to pharmacists.
• Allowing for the creation of non-governmental Immediate Care Medical Centres, based on the French model, to treat non-life-threatening emergencies.

“Solving the crisis in primary care is essential if we want to keep patients from continuing to fall through the cracks,” says Faubert. “Policymakers must find the political courage to open up health-care delivery to independent and alternative providers, or else this crisis is bound to get worse.”