Wait Times at Walk-In Clinics in Canada Increased by 50 Percent in 2022

Pedestrians walk along a street in Halifax on Jan. 26, 2023. (Darren Calabrese/The Canadian Press)

Wait times for Canadians at walk-in medical clinics rose by nearly 50 percent in 2022 compared to the previous year, providing yet another symptom of the crisis in health care.

The recently released Medimap Walk-in Clinic Wait Time Index shows that Canadians had to wait 37 minutes on average to see a doctor last year, a 12-minute increase from the year before, when the average wait was 25 minutes.

Medimap operates in six provinces—British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Nova Scotia—and the company says approximately 70 percent of walk-in clinics across Canada use its software to share their wait times. It uses this data to publish wait times online, allowing people who need a doctor to find out where the wait is shortest in their area.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Medimap’s VP of operations Teddy Wickland said there’s not enough doctors to go around.

“There’s frankly just a supply-demand imbalance in terms of the number of primary care physicians, family doctors, and walk-in clinics to the number of patients who need care. Especially coming out of the pandemic, you had doctors who were really burned out, [so] some of them decided to retire early or decided to change specialties entirely,” Wickland said.

“We’ve heard that anecdotally, from a number of our partners—that they’re actually closing their walk-in clinic and converting it to something else. A cosmetic dermatology clinic, for example, is one thing that we’ve heard a bunch.”

Ontario had the shortest average wait time in 2022, with patients waiting only 25 minutes to see a physician. Patients in Nova Scotia and British Columbia had the longest wait times, at 83 minutes and 79 minutes respectively.

Within these provinces, however, there were wide disparities among cities. Brampton, Ontario, had an average wait time of just 10 minutes, while London patients had to wait 80 minutes on average. In Nova Scotia, Halifax residents waited 55 minutes while those in Dartmouth waited 117 minutes. In B.C., Richmond patients waited 31 minutes on average, while those in North Vancouver waited 160 minutes.

“B.C. for a number of years has been the worst province for wait times for walk-in clinics. We’ve heard anecdotally about clinics closing and doctors leaving practice … [especially] in the Vancouver area,” Wickland said.

“We had heard both from doctors who worked in a clinic or owned their own clinic, and from administrators who were part of a large organization, that a lot of doctors were retiring early, I think because they were so burned out because the work-life balance of a walk-in clinic doctor is incredibly challenging.”

(Courtesy Medimap)

Pressure

Vancouver-based Susan Martinuk, a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the author of “Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health-Care Crisis,” says the pressures on walk-in clinics are unprecedented.

“It’s just a function of numbers. Some walk-in clinics have even had to close because they don’t have doctors. Five million Canadians don’t have a family doctor. There’s a lot of pressure on walk-in clinics, and there just aren’t enough doctors to deal with the flow,” Martinuk told The Epoch Times.

Billing is higher to treat someone in emergency rooms than it is at walk-in clinics, giving one more reason for government to encourage people to go to walk-in clinics instead.

“Canadians earlier on in the pandemic were asked to avoid the emergency room. Over the last couple of years, I think Canadians have become very aware that it’s really bad when you have to go to the emergency department, that it’s not a good place to go.”

In the Prairies, Manitoba’s average wait time was 31 minutes in 2022, Alberta’s 34 minutes, and Saskatchewan’s 51,. Alberta’s wait time was 25 minutes in 2020 and actually decreased to 18 in 2021, making it the only province that did not have two consecutive years of increase in wait times. The rise in Nova Scotia was most dramatic, going from 35 minutes in 2020 to 44 in 2021, then almost doubling to 83 last year.

‘We Need a Lot of Changes’

Wait time issues are evident in other aspects of health care. On Jan. 30, SecondStreet.org announced that 3.2 million Canadians are either waiting for surgery, or for a diagnostic scan, or to see a specialist.

The data was compiled from Freedom of Information requests, but gaps in the data suggest the true total is more than 3.8 million, according to the organization, which works to explore how government policies impact everyday Canadians.

SecondStreet.org president Colin Craig said that the pandemic did not create the wait list problem but that it has made the problem worse.

“The sad thing is that Canadians have become a bit numb to the idea that they’re going to wait forever to get the health-care services they need,” Craig said in an interview.

“We need a lot of changes when it comes to health care in this country so that ultimately patients’ lives are improved.”

Craig said broader opportunities for the private sector to innovate improvements to health care have been especially hindered in B.C. There, the government has fought Dr. Brian Day’s constitutional challenge to allow private medical insurance.

“Our own polling showed in the past that British Columbia patients definitely support governments working with the private sector, rather than against them. But for the most part that really hasn’t been the government’s approach,” Craig said.

A November 2021 Leger poll for SecondStreet.org found that 62 percent of Canadians would either “strongly support” or “somewhat support” people paying for their own health care at private clinics. This ranged from 57 percent in Ontario, where support was lowest, to 71 percent in B.C.

Nadeem Esmail, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, says the Medimap index is another piece of evidence demonstrating a consistent problem.

“The health-care system is poorly structured,” Esmail told The Epoch Times.

“Other developed nations have figured out better ways to deliver universal access to health-care services. Now, these ways are not entirely consistent with the Canada Health Act and [not] entirely consistent with what the defenders of medicare would like to see, but they are absolutely consistent with the principle of universal access to high-quality care in a time frame that provides comfort and peace of mind.”

Esmail believes the Canada Health Act is imposing the shackles that must be removed.

“It’s about allowing the private sector to do what it does best, which is deliver quality services at good value with a patient focus. That’s a lesson that’s been learned in Sweden, Australia, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands,” he said.