More British Columbians are leaving emergency rooms without being treated by a physician, a new report published on Thursday states.
The report, published by the MEI, recorded nearly 2.6 million emergency room visits in 2024 and found that of these, 142,961 visits ended with a patient leaving before receiving treatment.
Across Canada, over 1.2 million patients left emergency rooms untreated last year, according to the MEI.
“These patients are not leaving because they feel better, but because the system is failing them,” Emmanuelle B. Faubert, economist at the MEI and author of the report, said in a release.
“Thousands of British Columbians are being denied access to care each year.”
In B.C., the MEI found that the ratio of patients leaving emergency rooms without being treated has surged 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.
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The report states that B.C. also doesn’t track the severity of cases leaving an emergency room untreated, meaning policymakers and hospital administrators are left in the dark about where to focus their efforts.
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Looking at the data across Canada, about one in every 13 visits to emergency rooms resulted in patients leaving untreated.
The data does not include patients living in Saskatchewan or those covered by New Brunswick’s Vitalité Santé health network, as the MEI states that those health authorities failed to provide the 2024 data in time for publication.
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; and
- 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,” Faubert added.
“Policymakers must find the political courage to open up healthcare delivery to independent and alternative providers, or else this crisis is bound to get worse.”
The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.
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