On our declining healthcare system
(Photo: Marcelo Leal/Unsplash)
It’s no secret that Ontario has a healthcare worker shortage. Crowded emergency rooms, long wait times, hallway gurneys, and overworked staff are practically guaranteed in hospitals today — but why?
According to a recent report from the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada (AFMC), the medical school acceptance rate was 18.3% in 2025. With only 17 fully accredited schools in the country and limited seats available, applicants are expected to have hundreds of volunteer, research, and clinical hours to even be considered.
Consequently, pre-med students are burning out before they’ve graduated or choosing specializations like pharmacology or dentistry to avoid going to medical school altogether.
More than 2.5 million Ontario residents do not have a family doctor, and that number is expected to rise to 4 million within the next five years. Ontarians are often forced to present at emergency rooms or urgent care facilities to treat minor ailments, resulting in a backlog of patients, overcrowding, and inadequate service as healthcare workers struggle to meet the demand.
Take our frontline nurses, for example. The Canadian Federation of Nurses Union found that nurses who worked overtime in 2022 worked an average of 8.2 extra hours on top of their regular shifts per week. 16-hour shifts have become more common in recent years, despite significant health and safety risks for patients and practitioners alike.
Healthcare workers are also far more likely to be attacked at work than both police officers and prison guards. While I am sympathetic toward those experiencing prolonged pain or crisis, it’s impossible to rationally defend workplace violence in any context. Nurses are not trained in kung fu, yet they are expected to endure being assaulted as “just part of the job.”
It’s not just healthcare workers that are affected by the deficit: patients are too.
The College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) found that having access to a family physician lowers mortality, delayed diagnosis, hospitalization, and emergency department visit rates. When there’s a shortage, hospitals are forced to fill the gap.
Even Windsor Regional Hospital suffers from wait time problems, with a 3.5 hour average wait as of the time of writing; however in a 2024 statement, Canadian Medical Association (CMA) president Dr. Kathleen Ross claimed that “testimonies from around the country illustrate that patients in some jurisdictions are waiting as long as 20 hours or longer to receive care.”
We may have it (relatively) good here in Windsor, but the same cannot be said for other hospitals in the province, especially rural hospitals and health centres.
While none of these problems have clear one-size-fits-all solutions, clearly something needs to change — and fast. Canada is known for its world-class healthcare system, and I’d hate for it to collapse under the pressure.