How Canada Can Reduce ER Wait Times | What’s Working

A library in Huntsville, Ontario is helping patients avoid unnecessary ER visits. Three out of four patients say the clinic helped them avoid a trip to the emergency room. The results show that communities can reduce pressure on ERs by putting practical solutions into action.

We hear plenty about what is broken in Canadian healthcare. But communities across Canada are also showing us what works. They are reducing ER crowding and closing gaps in access with practical, team based care. They are not waiting for a radical overhaul. They are putting the right healthcare professionals in the right places and helping patients get the care they need before they end up in the emergency room.

The library that’s quietly fixing healthcare

In Huntsville, Ontario, a nurse-practitioner-led clinic was built directly into the local library. It now serves more than 1,600 people, and three out of four of them say the clinic helped them avoid an emergency room visit entirely. In Neil’s Harbour, Nova Scotia, adding a single nurse prescriber to the local care team redirected roughly a quarter of less-urgent patients away from the ER. Neither of these required new hospitals or massive capital spending. They required putting the right kind of provider, in the right place, for the kind of care most people actually need.

The scale-up is already underway

These aren’t one-off pilot projects. The number of nurse practitioners in Canada has more than doubled since 2014, and as of April 2026, most provinces cover primary care delivered by NPs, pharmacists, and midwives at no out-of-pocket cost to patients. British Columbia has been the most aggressive mover: the province added more than 1,000 family doctors and tripled its supply of primary-care nurse practitioners since 2017, and in a single year matched a record 250,000 people to a primary care provider through its Health Connect Registry.

Why this matters more than it might seem to

Good news healthcare stories do more than make us feel hopeful. They give us evidence of what works.

A library clinic in one community helps three quarters of its patients avoid the ER. That result shows what team based care supported by nurse practitioners can achieve when communities give it the right resources. Provinces can study these successes, adapt them and build on them.

British Columbia also connected a quarter of a million people with primary care providers in a single year. Results like these challenge the idea that where you live must determine your access to care. Provinces make choices about how they allocate resources, build capacity and deliver care. They can also choose to learn from approaches that are already producing results.

The common-sense version of scaling this up

None of these examples required Canadians to give up anything they value about universal care. They required expanding who’s allowed to deliver frontline care, funding the training pipeline to produce more of them, and building the primary-care infrastructure clinics, registries, team-based practices to connect patients to providers efficiently. That’s not a partisan program. It’s a proven one, sitting in plain sight in the provinces and towns that have already tried it.

Steal this idea, Canada. Join Common Sense Healthcare Canada and help push what’s already working into every province.

Sources: CIHI, “Team-based care in sight as one solution to primary care challenges”; CBC News reporting on nurse practitioner primary care coverage expansion; British Columbia Ministry of Health, Health Connect Registry reporting.