September 18, 2025
RED FM News Desk
A new report from the Montreal Economic Institute (MEI) reveals a significant problem for British Columbia’s healthcare system: last year, approximately 143,000 people in the province left emergency rooms without receiving treatment. This includes some patients who had already been triaged.
Emmanuelle B. Faubert, an economist at the MEI, noted that 5.5% of patients in B.C. left the ER untreated. While this rate is better than the national average of 7.8%, it still means that five percent of people are falling through the cracks.
The report identifies long wait times as a primary complaint, attributing the issue to an aging and growing population, limited access to primary care, and ongoing staffing shortages, all of which contribute to overcrowding in emergency rooms.
To address this issue, the MEI has made three recommendations:
Increasing the use of specialized nurse practitioner clinics.
Granting a broader scope of practice to pharmacists.
Allowing the creation of non-governmental Immediate Care Medical Centres, modeled on the French system, to treat non-life-threatening emergencies. Faubert acknowledges that this third recommendation would essentially be a form of private healthcare.
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