Provincial data obtained through a request for freedom of information reveal that the number of patients in BC abandoning emergency rooms without receiving care has been reduced by 86 percent, with the highest increases observed in the health authorities of Fraser Health and Vancouver Island.
The data reveal the number of unchanging visits to emergency rooms in the BC health authorities between 2018 and 2025, and breakd down the visits of patients for their Canadian classification and the aquity scale (CTA), a system used to classify patients based on the urgency of their case.
It also includes another category of entitled patients: left without being seen (LWB).
According to the numbers compiled by the BC Ministry of Health, in fiscal year 2018-2019, 76,157 patients in BC abandoned emergency rooms without receiving attention.
By 2024-2025, that number grew to 141,961.
When the broken health authority, the numbers show that, in some regions, the cases of LWB worsened significantly in the last two years. In BC, the number of patients who abandoned emergency rooms without receiving care grew 18 percent between 2023 and 2025.
‘Significantly out of acceptable range’
The Health Authority of the Island of Vancouver saw a particularly large increase in patients who left before receiving care, with 11,513 cases registered in 2018-2019, 20,925 cases registered in 2023-2024 and 29,997 cases registered in 2024-2025. That represents a growth of 160 percent in seven years.
A document of the island’s health authority on performance measures published in January 2025 said that although the objective of the LWB authority is two percent, 7.3 percent of the patients who left before seeing a doctor were currently seeing.
“As of November 2024, Island Health did not meet the objective of this measure,” says the document.
“Performance is significantly outside the acceptable range.”
The document says that “occasionally, people seeking attention in the emergency departments are registered and receive a classification evaluation of a nurse, but then leave the emergency department (of) before seeing a doctor.”
“If a person was looking for attention to an emergency service, but he left before seeing a doctor, he may not receive the attention he needed.”
The document also indicates that the factors that contribute to the high rate, pointing out that “emergency arrivals and hospitalized patients increase in an emergency place contribute to the waterm [increases]”
The population served by Island Health grew by 11 percent between 2018 and 2024, according to Statistics Canada.
In the Fraser Health Authority, the highest health authority in BC, there were 34,678 LWB registered in 2018-2019.
That number increased to 55,415 in 2023-2024, and increased to 64,972 by 2024-2025, which represents a general growth of 87 percent.
The population of Fraser Health also grew around 4.6 percent during that time, according to BC statistics. The population in the health authority is expected to grow by 32 percent in the next 15 years.
The Vancouver coastal health authority registered 13,353 LWB in 2018-2019, up to 21,475 in 2023-2024, and a slight fall to 20,898 in 2024-2025.
CBC News has contacted the BC Ministry of Health to comment.
In a statement, BC opposition conservatives described the figures as “devastating.”
The data support the stories of the patients
The data is produced after a series of high profile stories on deterioration conditions in the BC emergency rooms, which described long waiting times, indignified conditions for patients and their families, and violent attacks against medical staff.
The doctor of the emergency room, Kaitlin Stockton, launched an explosive demand against Fraser’s health authority in June, claiming that his work was threatened after he tried to warn patients of the waiting times “unacceptable”.
Two nurses in the same health authority were also presented detailing brutal attacks that, they say they suffered at the hands of patients while working in BC emergency rooms.
In an interview with CBC after the two stories, the Minister of Health, Josie Osborne, said that patients with the most critical needs look first, resulting in longer waiting times for less urgent cases. She said the province is currently reviewing each health authority in BC.
In a statement, BC doctors, which represents more than 16,000 doctors, residents and medical students, said “has been asking for the creation of a stabilization plan of the emergency department for some time.”
“The shortage of doctors is also affecting emergency departments, and recent efforts to recruit American doctors and the new SFU Medicine School are certainly useful, but it needs to be done more to recruit and retain doctors, nurses and other health professionals to meet the needs of patients,” he says.
