Ontario Emergency Departments Lose 10% of Physicians Amid Burnout Crisis

A cancer diagnosis delivered in a crowded, noisy room. A patient with a brain bleed treated on an ambulance stretcher in a hallway. A person arriving in septic shock after hours in a waiting room.

Those are the kinds of scenes Dr. Kaitlin Stockton, a Vancouver emergency physician and spokesperson for the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, said are behind the numbers in a new national study on burnout in Canadian emergency rooms. “It’s demoralizing” for doctors to witness patient harm and keep raising concerns without seeing meaningful changes, she said.

A workforce pulling back

The study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, surveyed more than 400 emergency physicians across Canada about burnout and attrition.

Its findings point to a profession under deep strain. About one in 10 surveyed emergency physicians had left emergency medicine. Nearly half of respondents had reduced their clinical hours, and about one in five had taken time off work.

For a 24-hour part of the health-care system, those decisions matter. Fewer hours and departures do not just reflect individual distress. They also mean less capacity in departments already described by respondents as overwhelmed by high patient volumes, overcrowding, long waits and limited resources.

Researchers found women and younger physicians reported higher burnout rates than other respondents, a warning sign for the future of the emergency workforce.

‘The system is broken’

The central message from doctors was blunt.

“The prevailing theme was that the health-care system is broken,” Dr. Kerstin de Wit and her colleagues wrote.

Respondents attributed burnout to broad system pressures, not simply the demands of emergency medicine itself. They described emergency departments as absorbing failures elsewhere in the health-care system, while being expected to manage rising volumes with limited resources and little room to move patients through care.

One survey comment quoted in the source reporting described the health-care system as “brutal. Under resourced. Under supported. No end in sight.”

Others described the emotional cost of being the visible face of delays and bottlenecks they cannot control. Patients may wait too long, struggle to get diagnostic scans or face delays in seeing specialists, while emergency staff are left to manage the anger and fear at the front door.

Stockton said that dynamic is driving people away. “We’re seeing this alarming exodus of health-care workers across the country,” she said.

Burnout reaches patients

The researchers concluded that emergency physician burnout threatens patient safety and can reduce the quality of care patients receive.

That is the part of the study that makes the issue larger than workplace morale. Burnout in an emergency department can show up in the moments when patients most need clear judgment, attention and compassion.

De Wit described one consequence in starkly human terms: “The unfortunate side effect is that the patient doesn’t feel they’re being heard as well, or they leave the emergency department feeling there was no sympathy for their condition.”

The study’s authors warned that the problem should not be treated as only a lingering effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. They characterized emergency physician burnout as a sustained health-system problem, rooted in pressures that have continued beyond the pandemic period.

That distinction matters because it changes the remedy. If burnout is a temporary aftershock, time might be expected to ease it. If it is built into the way emergency care is now functioning, the system itself has to change.

Calls for system reform

The researchers and health-care leaders urged system-level reforms, including better emergency-department planning, team-based care, improved patient flow and stronger accountability for emergency access and wait times.

Those recommendations reflect the same theme that ran through the survey responses: emergency rooms cannot fix the entire health-care system by themselves.

Stockton said doctors are being asked to keep working inside conditions that are not sustainable. “These are not people that are nearing retirement,” she said. “These are people that are three, five, 10 years out from school that are leaving emergency medicine, leaving hospital-based medicine or actually leaving medicine altogether, because they can no longer sustain this job and still maintain their own well-being.”

For patients, the study’s message is equally direct. Burned-out doctors are not just a workforce concern. They are a sign that the emergency care system Canadians rely on is losing people, hours and resilience at the very moment it is being asked to carry more.

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