In lead up to the Ford government's 2026 budget, Ontario hospitals have been sounding the alarm about rising costs and "deepening structural" deficits, warning that "
tough choices" could be ahead and asking the province for more funding stability.
Venugopal said the ER-related statistics that are included in Ontario Health's latest annual report — emergency department length of stay for all visits and physician initial assessment (PIA) wait times — are also important metrics.
"The three metrics that matter are how fast we see them, how fast we get them out of the ER, and then when we don't succeed, what percentage of those are in unconventional spaces," he said.
At the end of 2024-25, 10 per cent of patients stayed a total of more than 11.8 hours in the ER, up from 11.7 hours the year prior.
"Performance was impacted by factors including seasonal respiratory illnesses and the acute care system operating consistently above 100% occupancy, which impeded patient movement out of the ED," the report stated, adding that "addressing ED wait times will be a focus for Ontario Health in 2025/26 with targeted interventions to support performance improvements."
The annual report also showed that 10 per cent of patients waited more than 4.6 hours to get assessed by a physician in March 2025, which Ontario Health said was a "major deviation against the year-end target of four hours." It was also slightly more than the 4.5 hours reported the previous year.
"Wait times to PIA (physician initial assessment) impacts ED care quality, safety and the patient experience," the agency stated.
Popovic, the health minister’s spokesperson, said that PIA times improved between April and November last year, from 4.4 hours to 4.1 hours. She added that in 2024-25, the total number of ED visits decreased by nearly 200,000 and non-urgent ED visits were reduced to less than 13 per cent.
She attributed this to the government’s “record investments” in health care — including $91.5 billion this year — and its moves to expand primary care and allow pharmacists to treat minor ailments.
“We have increased funding by 4% to the hospital sector for a record 3 years in a row while investing $44 million to tackle emergency department (ED) wait times and $10 million to upskill 1,000 nurses to work in emergency departments,” Popovic said.
Meanwhile, Shamji called the numbers in Ontario Health’s report "unacceptably high."
"What we're seeing in terms of the emergency department wait times, whether you look at it as length of stay or time to initial physician assessment, these are terrible outcomes that really paint the picture of emergency departments that are straining in ways that have never been seen before," he said.
The Trillium reported in 2024 on internal government data showing that one in 10 patients admitted to an Ontario hospital from an emergency department waited at least two days before getting a bed.
Additional reporting showed that in January 2024, an average of 1,860 patients per day were kept in unconventional spaces in hospitals across the province — the highest number till that point since 2017.
That was
according to data The Trillium obtained through the freedom-of-information system, which also showed an average of 826 patients per day in unconventional spaces in June 2018 when the Progressive Conservative government came into power.
Ontario Health changed the definition of hallway health care in February 2020, to include patients held in unconventional spaces outside the emergency department, not just inside it.
Doug Ford’s PCs ran on a campaign in 2018 that promised to "cut hospital wait times and end hallway medicine."
During last year's provincial election campaign, the PCs’ platform didn’t explicitly echo the 2018 commitment, but included health-care promises such as connecting all Ontarians to a family doctor or primary care team by 2029, additional medical school seats and investments to boost health-care staff.
The provincial Liberals centred their 2025 campaign on health care, saying at one campaign stop that the province’s hallway health-care issue had turned into an
“ER chair" crisis where patients are being treated in chairs because there aren’t enough beds or stretchers.
