When Care Becomes a Waiting Game

“Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.”

— Paulo Coelho

How long waits and worker shortages turn universal health care into a test of endurance—for both patients and providers

At Winnipeg’s St. Boniface Hospital, emergency physician Dr. Noam Katz describes a daily reality that sounds more like battlefield triage than routine medicine. “We have a front-row view of human suffering,” he said, as patients waited 10 to 20 hours for care while staff stood by, powerless to help. On the same afternoon, the city’s real-time wait-time tracker showed delays of more than twelve hours, proof that, in modern Canada, time itself has become one of the most precious and unevenly distributed resources in health care.

Across the country, similar stories unfold. In British Columbia, a patient at Eagle Ridge Hospital recently posted a photo of a sign warning of a twelve-hour emergency delay. The provincial median ER stay has stretched to its longest in five years, while staffing shortages have become routine. These numbers no longer shock; they describe a health-care system that is, by design or neglect, slower than the people it serves.

Behind every figure stand clinicians and families navigating the moral weight of waiting. Family physicians and nurses describe having to manage beyond their training, schedule repeat visits, and watch their patients deteriorate as they search for specialist care. Many speak of burnout and moral distress, the pain of witnessing suffering they cannot relieve. Waiting injures not only the patient in the hallway but the professional at the bedside.

From the lens of narrative medicine, these delays are more than logistical failures; they are interruptions in human stories. Every chart number conceals a lived experience of uncertainty, the elderly parent in pain, the child with a fever that won’t subside, the partner pacing a fluorescent corridor. To wait in such moments is to feel forgotten by a system meant to guarantee care as a right, not as a race.

Our modern technologies have eliminated almost every inconvenience. Groceries, rides, and news arrive instantly, yet the very field that promises compassion remains bound by systemic inertia. Digital systems can record a wait, but they cannot shorten it without people, without the human infrastructure of nurses, physicians, and support staff that turns data into care.

Reducing wait times is not merely an efficiency problem; it is a moral and human one. Timeliness is a form of empathy, a recognition that pain and fear cannot be paused. To restore that sense of urgency is to restore trust itself. Health care must relearn what narrative medicine already knows: that to respond swiftly is to affirm a person’s dignity, and that every hour of waiting risks turning a story of healing into one of loss.

Thanks for tuning in!

By Kiah Nirmal (she/her/hers) | Blog Committee Member

SOURCES:

Marshall, E. G., Hobbs, M., McMillan, J., Kolen, L., Pothier, D., & O’Sullivan, T. (2023). Primary care providers’ experiences with wait times for specialist care in Nova Scotia: A qualitative study. Healthcare Management Forum, 36(6), 340–344. https://doi.org/10.1177/08404704231182671

Baxter, D. (2025, September 3). Long ER wait times continue to frustrate patients in Winnipeg. CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/er-wait-times-winnipeg-1.7624767

Chan, C. (2025, June 4). New report finds wait times in B.C. emergency rooms continue to climb. Vancouver Sun. https://vancouversun.com/news/new-report-wait-times-bc-emergency-rooms-continue-to-climb