Province's emergency rooms closed almost 2,400 times from 2023-25
This year won't be much different, says Doctors of B.C.
Nearly 2,400 temporary ER closures were recorded in B.C. between 2023 and 2025, according to a Postmedia analysis of Health Ministry data — with at least one emergency department briefly shut down on more than 900 out of 1,095 days.
The worst day was June 23, 2024, when seven ERS were temporarily closed. Some of them reopened but closed again the same day, resulting in 11 reported closures on that date.
The majority of closures involved hospitals in Northern and Interior Health, with a combined total of 26,600 hours over those three years.
And doctors don't believe 2026 will be much different.
“Our members are not suggesting there's been any significant change or improvements coming their way around emergency room closures and support,” said Adam Thompson, president of Doctors of B.C., an advocacy group.
The hospital in Chetwynd was one of the worst impacted with more than 200 temporary closures during the three-year period, 10 of which lasted 24 hours or longer, according to ministry data.
The health centre in Hudson's Hope, a small community one hour west of Fort St. John, was another. It had 289 individual closures lasting more than 2,200 hours, or 91 days, during the three-year period.
In January, the Health Ministry announced a new website to inform people about emergency room closures in the Northern Health region. Island Health offers a similar website, listing estimated waiting times and status for emergency departments — they are the only two health authorities to provide centralized, real-time information about ER closures.
“Rural and smaller communities are particularly vulnerable, partly because they tend to have a lower staffing, so one or two people going off can just shut down a department,” Thompson said.
The province has offered signing and retention bonuses to entice healthcare workers to fill staffing gaps in remote and rural communities.
“I call it the whack-a-mole approach to ER closures,” said Paul Adams, executive director of the B.C. Rural Health Network.
“If you are filling a position because it's incentive-based and you're able to draw an individual to a community, you're drawing them from somewhere, and they're all staffed at a skeletal level, so when you take that one key player out, the system collapses,” he said.
Adams said securing transportation and accommodation is an essential first step for patients in remote and rural communities “so people are not forced into taking on debt in order to receive the care they're entitled to.”
“You can go a long way in reducing the number of chronic patients in the system if you're willing to pay for them to seek the care that they need outside of their community,” he said.
Jon Braunstein, a co-president of the emergency medicine section of Doctors of B.C., said at any given time in Canada, 15 to 20 per cent of ER beds are filled with patients who don't need to be in the ER but have nowhere else to go.
“If you open up places for those patients to go who don't need acute care, you're going to open up a lot of capacity for those who do,” he said.
Starting in August 2024, closures started impacting the Lower Mainland, when the ER at Mission Memorial Hospital was shuttered on three occasions for just under a total of 24 hours.
Six more closures followed in 2025 and there have been several in 2026, including a June 19 announcement that there would be no doctors staffing the ER overnight on eight days between June 20 and July 8. On April 2, Abbotsford-mission MLA Reann Gasper sent a letter to Health Minister Josie Osborne asking for emergency funding for new staff and weekly public reporting on ER staffing and closure risks, saying local residents “have already been patient for too long.”
“It is clear that the current approach is failing to stabilize staffing. The government's statements about long-term recruitment efforts are not translating into short-term results on the ground,” Gasper wrote. “We need a clear plan.”
In an email, the Health Ministry said the minister met with Gasper and hospital administrators to discuss longand short-term strategies and that Fraser Health was actively recruiting doctors for Mission Memorial.
“Several physician candidates are currently moving through the hiring process and are expected to help improve coverage in the coming months,” the ministry wrote.
New rules coming into effect this month are expected to speed up the onboarding process for new international medical graduates, according to the ministry.
It added that 110 U.S. health-care workers had accepted jobs in Fraser Health between March 2025 and February 2026.
Braunstein said the spread of ER closures to places like Mission and Delta is the result of the same forces playing out across the province: overworked staff working in overcrowded emergency departments, unable to provide the level of care they would like and often doing so in the face of increasing verbal abuse and threats of violence.
“People working in emergency departments often are fairly skilled, they can find work elsewhere, and I think what we're seeing now is that eventually the trade-off between what they want to do in terms of providing the care versus the burnout and distress leads them to find work in other places,” Braunstein said.
Some parts of the province have seen progress.
The number of ER closures on Vancouver Island fell from 27 in 2023 to three in 2025. In November 2025, Island Health announced a $30 million investment from the provincial government had helped stabilize services in the north of the island, adding 110 new staff in the region, improving transportation options to hospitals and bringing more care to local communities.
Thompson said that level of spending isn't something the government can afford to expand.
“We have to acknowledge that we're in a difficult fiscal environment,” he said.
Island Health also partnered with the Gwa'sala-'nakwaxda'xw Nations to build housing specifically for healthcare workers in Port Hardy.
In an email, Island Health stressed that collaboration and engagement with local communities was critical for recruiting and retaining healthcare workers.
“People are more likely to stay in communities where they feel connected and valued,” the authority wrote.
Both Braunstein and Adams agreed and said giving locals the training and skills to fill some of the needed roles could help reduce staff turnover.
“Pull people in from the community and make it a good environment to work in, and then people are more likely to work there,” Braunstein said.
Adams said that while specialty care should be regionalized, “We should be maintaining as many services within rural communities as possible in order to retain not only the health service provision locally, but it also retains your community leaders.”
Everyone Postmedia spoke with said engaging with front-line staff and communities on the ground is essential to finding appropriate solutions.
“The front-line workers have the solutions and the understanding of what is happening in their departments and what is working well to support them in providing good quality care and what needs to be improved,” Thompson said. ngriffiths@postmedia.com @njgriffiths