When Dr. Justin Hall started his 7 a.m. shift in the ER at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre on a recent Wednesday, there were already more than 60 patients waiting.

Sunnybrook is one of the busiest hospitals in Canada, with the country's largest trauma centre and burn centre.

It also has the distinction of having the longest wait time in Ontario. In 2024, the median length of stay for patients at Sunnybrook was eight hours and 13 minutes.

That means half the patients in Sunnybrook’s emergency department waited even longer, from the moment they first registered to the moment they left.

"It's a big problem,” said Hall, who is Sunnybrook's chief of emergency medicine.

Roughly 500,000 Canadians left ERs before seeing a doctor last year, data shows

But in July, the hospital sta

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