For most Ontarians, getting sick during the holidays is more than inconvenient; it exposes a brutal flaw in how Ontario’s health care system is structured.
Over the holiday break, I spent seven hours in an emergency room (ER) for a suspected bacterial sinus infection that required antibiotics. I only went to the ER after being unable to access care, as walk-in clinics were closed and pharmacies couldn’t treat me. Yet, somehow, there’s an established narrative that overcrowded ERs are due to “ER misuse.”
To place the blame on the patients in this case is fundamentally wrong. Patients aren’t embezzling their conditions or exploiting resources; they need care and have exhausted every other option.
According to a Health Quality Ontario report examining emergency department use, 47 per cent of adults arriving with non-urgent conditions felt they could’ve been resolved in a primary care setting if such care were accessible. This indicates that the lack of accessible primary care is a key reason for ER visits, not the stigmas of patient “misuse”.
In Ontario, emergency departments operate through a triage system, focused on prioritizing life-threatening cases, while leaving the non-urgent cases at the bottom of the waitlist until there’s time. While this system makes logical sense, there’s an increase in emergency room visits during the holidays, attributed to intensified seasonal illnesses, weather contributing to various accidents, and the cherry on top—primary care clinics being closed. According to Global News, emergency physicians have described the holiday period as “absolutely overwhelming,” with a noticeable surge in patients.
Our province’s healthcare system is designed as if illness pauses during the holiday season when, in reality, it worsens.
A pause in healthcare access during the holidays means that cases classified as non-urgent, such as throat, ear or sinus infections, mild respiratory illnesses, prescriptions, anything that could worsen if left untreated but aren’t immediately life-threatening, are pushed to the bottom of the list.
Because non-urgent cases are routinely treated at a clinic or at a family doctor’s office, emergency rooms absorb the cases over the holidays, increasing wait times for everyone involved.
In Kingston, students and families heavily rely on primary care sources spread out across the city, as there’s limited access to physicians. Physician access being further limited during the holidays leaves the community that stays in town without a realistic alternative for non-emergency cases, resulting in the ER becoming everyone’s default care unit.
What’s worse is that this is an avoidable issue that persists even though there’s an evident reason for change.
The provincial government, which sets policies and allocates resources, is responsible for the absence of setting reasonable standards for what care during the holidays could look like.
The Ontario Medical Association and Health Quality Ontario advocate for solutions that could resurrect the issue, like mandating regional holiday coverage for primary care clinics or expanding the allowance for who can prescribe for common infections, which would alleviate some of the stress that comes to the emergency room while bringing benefits to the patients, workers, and the healthcare system overall.
Until Ontario treats access to basic healthcare as essential, ERs will continue to serve as the front door of a health care system that should know better.
Mabel is a third-year Biology student and one of The Journal’s Copy Editors.
Tags
Clinics, Emergency Rooms, Healthcare, healthcare access, Ontario
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