Close to 150,000 British Columbians went to emergency departments and left without receiving care between 2018 to 2024, according to newly released data.
The new information, obtained by the B.C. Conservative Party via a freedom of information request and released July 23, shows that almost 142,000 individuals visited ERs in the province and left before getting medical attention in 2024, an 86 percent jump in walkouts from 2018—and a 160 percent hike in walkouts in ERs on Vancouver Island during that same period.
“A lot of people still don’t have GPs [general practitioners/family doctors], and so they go to emergency for treatment, as well as waiting for specialist appointments, which sometimes can take months. And when they wait, they get sicker. So where do they go? They go to emergency,” Conservative MLA and health critic Dr. Anna Kindy said in a July 25 interview with The Epoch Times.
B.C.’s Ministry of Health said patients are never turned away from emergency departments (ED) and that those who end up leaving before being seen represent only a “small proportion” of total patient visits.
“The number of patients that leave the ED without being seen is a small proportion of the total number of visits to the ED. In general, patients with lower acuity levels are more likely to leave the ED without seeing a physician,” said a spokesperson for the ministry in a July 25 email to The Epoch Times.
According to Kindy, these high numbers are a “multi-department issue” related to hospitals running close to or over capacity and having difficulty in moving patients out of emergency into the ward, along with a shortage of GPs, an ageing population requiring more emergency care, and a spike in drug overdoses.
“It’s not one factor, it’s the whole thing,” Kindy said, adding that the walkout numbers should be public information. “We pay for our health care, and that data should be given without having to request FOIs,” she said, referring to freedom of information requests.
The ministry says that because it understands “long waits can be challenging for patients,” it increased acute care beds in the province in November 2023 by 7.9 percent from 9,202 beds to 9,929 beds.
“We are also working hard to strengthen not only acute care, but also primary care, by bringing new doctors and nurse practitioners into the province through fair pay, better conditions and faster credential recognition, and retaining and training more health-care workers here in B.C.,” the ministry said, adding that since this initiative was launched in 2018, “more than 750,000 people have been connected with a primary care provider in their community.”
The ministry noted that the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) is used to decide which patients get seen first on an emergency visit depending primarily on “how sick patients are, and the complexity of care required at a given time.” The ministry said those who are classified as the highest severity levels of 1 or 2 “do not wait to receive care.”
“Most physicians are doing well with it, trying to triage, but people fall through the cracks,” Kindy said, adding that hospital wait times can be as long as 12 to 14 hours, causing people to give up and leave.
Kindy, who has worked as a family doctor for almost 38 years and continues to assist while serving as an MLA, said health care in the province has gone noticeably downhill. She added that the province should be looking at other health care models at some point, such as in Europe, “which is universal health care, but it has evolved.”
“Ours hasn’t, and that’s why we’re where we are. They allow a parallel system. Again, it’s universal, but you can access healthcare through channels,” she said.
For its part, the ministry said that the province is continuing to work on boosting access to emergency care and lower wait times.
“Health authorities continue to improve patient flow within EDs, hospitals, and continue to recruit to manage increasing patient volumes,” the ministry said, adding that “Island Health successfully recruited nearly 1,800 net new employees in 2024, including more than 800 new nurses,” and has made average wait times for care available online, along with average wait times in the Lower Mainland.
Kindy says not enough is being done to lower wait times and improve health care in the province, particularly with shortening emergency wait times. In addition to what she sees as positives such as fast-tracking bringing in doctors from outside the province, “things that should be done, for example, increasing hospital capacity or increasing even medical school enrollment, I’m not seeing much done on that side,” she said. “Unless they address that issue, it’s just going to get worse.”
