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But whatever the specific reason, it’s clear that the hospital was either unwilling or unable to muster sufficient resources to cope with the demand. At least four other people had left before I did. A few others looked about ready to hit the road, too. For my son, the medical consequences of the delay were zero. But we cannot be confident that that was the case for all those who sought help that night and didn’t get it. Delays in accessing health care are an undisputed contributor to poorer health-care outcomes. It’s also not disputed by anyone that people sometimes make stupid decisions when they’re tired, frustrated and in pain — like maybe deciding that whatever ailment took them there can wait until another day. Most of the time, it probably can. But not every time.

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Not everyone who shows up at an ER needs to be there, but some of them do, and no triage system is perfect. If patients are walking about hospitals having not received care, when you scale that problem up to the size of a province, people are going to suffer or die.

Crowded ERs and long wait lists for treatments, another chronic problem, are symptoms of a system that is simply being run far too close to the edge — or beyond it. Other examples abound. In 2016, Statistics Canada reported that 10 per cent of Ontarians did not have a family doctor — and that number was going up. The international best-practice standard for hospital occupancy is 85 per cent — full enough to not be wasteful but with a bit of reserve capacity left over for emergencies or surges. Ontario hospitals routinely operate at over 100 per cent capacity; this is why we have so-called “hallway medicine.” Ontario’s long-term care (LTC) and rehab hospitals, where patients are transferred after they no longer require acute care, are also seriously backlogged, so much so that the former Liberal government began re-opening hospitals that had been deemed surplus and mothballed simply to use them as LTC or rehab wards. The Ford government has pledged to open 15,000 new beds over the next few years. That’s a good start, and would ease hospital overcrowding — on any given day, roughly 15 per cent of patients in primary care hospitals are waiting for a bed at a LTC or rehab facility.