Nearly 430,000 Quebecers left an emergency room without treatment last year, finds the MEI

• Across Canada, over 1.2 million patients left emergency rooms untreated last year.

Montreal, September 18, 2025 — The number of patients leaving Quebec’s emergency rooms without being treated is rising, reveals a report published this morning by the MEI.

“These patients are not leaving because they feel better, but because the system is failing them,” says Emmanuelle B. Faubert, economist at the MEI and author of the report. “Thousands of Quebecers are being denied access to care each year.”

In 2024, Quebec recorded over 3.7 million emergency room visits. Of these, 428,676 ended with a patient leaving before receiving treatment, representing 11.6 per cent of all visits.

This marks a worsening trend, with the ratio of patients leaving increasing by 8.8 per cent since 2019.

Patients in Quebec walk away from emergency rooms without receiving care at a rate that is higher than the national average of 7.8 per cent.

Across Canada, 16.3 million emergency room visits were made last year, and 1,267,736 patients were left untreated—around one in every thirteen visits. This data doesn’t include patients living in Saskatchewan, or those covered by New Brunswick’s Vitalité Santé health network, those health authorities having both failed to provide the requested 2024 data in time for publication.

The deterioration is observed nationwide, as rates of premature departures have risen significantly since 2019. Last year the number of Canadian patients leaving without treatment increased by 35.6 per cent.

Most patients leaving an emergency room untreated in Quebec are classified as either P4 or P5, representing semi-urgent and non-urgent cases. Because they are deemed low priority, these patients are pushed to the back of the line and face some of the longest ER waits. This testifies to a lack of access to primary care.

The MEI researcher emphasized that patients forced to delay or forgo care often end up suffering from worsening conditions, which lead to more complex cases.

In a U.S. study conducted between 2019 and 2020, researchers found that 55 per cent of patients who left an emergency room before being treated ended up consulting a healthcare professional within three weeks of their initial visit.

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,” says Ms. Faubert. “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 Economic Note is available here.

Tailored provincial media releases can be found here: Alberta / British Columbia / Manitoba / New Brunswick / Newfoundland and Labrador / Nova Scotia / Ontario / Prince Edward Island.

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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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