A new study has revealed that the number of patients leaving Manitoba's emergency rooms without being seen is rising.
According to MEI, an independent public policy think tank, Manitoba recorded over 456,000 emergency room visits in 2024. Of those visits, 60,328 ended with a patient leaving before receiving treatment.
"These patients are not leaving because they feel better, but because the system is failing them," said Emmanuelle B. Faubert, economist at the MEI and author of the report. "Thousands of Manitobans are being denied access to care each year.”
MEI says that 13.2 per cent of all visits end in the patient leaving, an 87.8 percent increase since 2019.
Meanwhile, in comparison to the rest of the country, patients in Manitoba walk away from emergency rooms without receiving care at a rate that is higher than the national average of 7.8 per cent.
According to the study done by MEI, most patients leaving an emergency room untreated in Manitoba are classified as either P4 or P5, meaning they are semi-urgent and non-urgent cases, leaving these patients at the back of the line with some of the longest ER waits, something the MEI says is due to the lack of access to primary care.
"Solving the crisis in primary care is essential if we want to keep patients from continuing to fall through the cracks," said Emmanuelle B. 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."
This isn't just a Manitoba issue. MEI says across the country, out of over 16.2 million emergency room visits in 2024, over 1.2 million patients left without being treated, which is 7.78% of the total, or around one in every 13 visits.
The MEI has offered some recommendations to help fix this situation, including 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.