Transparency Grade: F
Closures
What's the data showing?
Emergency room closures have become routine, something that could not have been contemplated even a few years ago.
Sources
FOI Requests
Unplanned ER closures [source]
FOI data in CSV [data incorporated from above FOI request]
While no statistics are readily available from hospital, health authorities, or governments, some journalists and others have gotten creative.
For example, Caitlin Coombes at Energeticcity.ca scraped Northern Health's Facebook account, which was used to communicate with the public about such closures. She found than in a seven month period, hospitals were closed 53 times, leaving residents without emergency medical care for more than 800 hours.
Others have taken matters into their own hands, such as iseropen.ca for Northern BC created by a Dawson Creek web developer.
Some data available via FOI
It's easy to find one-off reports or details about a single site, such as the multiple ER closures in Merritt.
But not surprisingly, official data is very hard to come by.
A FOI request did reveal information on 1800+ unplanned ER closures between Jan/2023–Apr/2025. Note that this does not count situations where ER hours have been deliberately reduced over an extended period of time, such as happened at Port Hardy.
