Quebec ERs: overcrowding and wait times

In 2024-2025, Quebec emergency rooms handled 3.49 million visits - a 16% increase from the 3.01 million recorded in 2021-2022. Behind this growth, one indicator captures all the pressure: the overcrowding rate, defined as the share of stretcher patients who spend more than 24 hours in the ER. This rate peaked at 24.5% in 2022-2023 at the provincial level, before easing slightly to 22.9% in 2024-2025 - meaning over 262,000 patients spent an entire day or more on a stretcher in a Quebec ER. The data comes from the Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS) cumulative ER file, covering 115 installations over 5 consecutive fiscal years (April 2021 to March 2026).

Regional disparities are striking and cannot be explained by population size alone. In 2025-2026, the overcrowding rate ranges from 6.8% in Bas-Saint-Laurent to 32% in Laval - a nearly 5-to-1 gap. The outer Montreal regions (Laval, Laurentides, Outaouais, Montérégie) all exceed 27%, while more rural regions such as Bas-Saint-Laurent, Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, and Mauricie-Centre-du-Québec remain below 11%. Meanwhile, the aging of ER patients is accelerating: patients aged 75 and over grew from 449,000 in 2021-2022 to 582,000 in 2025-2026, an increase of 29.6% - nearly 2.5 times faster than the growth in total visits.

A few methodological notes: data is reported in fiscal years (April to March), not calendar years. The 2025-2026 figures appear provisional - total visits are lower than in 2024-2025 despite rising patient counts among the elderly, suggesting some facilities had not yet submitted final data at the time of extraction. Geographic coordinates for the 115 installations were sourced from the MSSS M02 cartographic file (donneesquebec.ca), joined on the installation permit number - 114 out of 115 installations were successfully geocoded. Performance targets set by the Quebec government (such as a 12-hour stretcher standard) are not included in this file.