No place for patients: Ontario’s hallway health care numbers hit unprecedented highs

New internal government data shows Ontario’s hallway health care problem is vastly outpacing population growth

On Thursday, Feb. 19, Michael Richardson returned home to Ottawa with a stomach ache.

It wasn’t out of the ordinary, but this one felt different. Two days later, the pain took him to The Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus.

After a slate of tests, Richardson was told he had about a dozen pulmonary embolisms, dangerous clots that block blood flow to the lungs.

“I’m 55. I’m in very good shape. That was totally surprising,” he said.

The diagnosis came around 2 a.m., but the hospital didn’t have a bed. Richardson was asked to stay in the waiting room until one freed up. He decided to take the short trip home and return to the hospital in the morning rather than wait overnight.

When he went back, he was met with a second surprise.

“They took me into the emergency room’s observation area and said, ‘We have a bed here for you.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, all right, that’s what we’re doing,’” he said.

Richardson couldn’t sleep. Other patients called loved ones without headphones. Footsteps, moving furniture, and the steady hum of the emergency department kept him awake.

He moved to another room, what he described as a storage closet, where paramedics gathered supplies. It was near the ambulance bay, and the constant sirens made sleep more elusive.

“I’m not on a heart-lung monitoring machine even though I have a pulmonary embolism and I could have a heart attack at any point,” he said. He eventually left the hospital in the early hours of Feb. 24 and has since recovered.

Richardson’s story isn’t unique. It’s replicated thousands of times a day in hospitals across the province.

On an average day in January 2025, Ontario hospitals treated 2,088 patients in hallways, break rooms and other spaces never meant for care.

It was the most since Ontario Health began tracking the number in 2017 and 52 per cent more than January 2018, the winter before Doug Ford won a majority government promising to end hallway health care.

Since then, provincial data have continued to show near-record levels of patients treated in these “unconventional spaces” — the official term for what’s colloquially known as hallway health care.

February 2025 saw a daily average of 2,041 patients treated in hallways across Ontario. The first two months of 2025 were the first time province-wide numbers eclipsed 2,000. January 2026 averaged 1,964, the third-highest month on record. December 2025, at 1,773, ranks fifth.

Old highs have become new lows.

January was the worst month of 2018, with 1,372 patients treated in hallways on an average day. Now, the system rarely dips below that number. The quietest month of 2025, August, averaged 1,358. Every month of 2024 was higher than the 2018 peak.

The figures come from internal Ontario Health data obtained by The Trillium through the freedom of information system.

The data is organized by hospital corporations, not individual hospitals. Hospital corporations can include a single hospital or multiple hospitals coupled with other health-care centres.

Hospitals are inundated with patients in winter, as flu and other respiratory diseases circulate, putting immense strain on the health-care system. But winter makes the problem worse. It doesn’t explain it.

Across all of 2025, hospitals treated an average of 1,605 patients a day in unconventional spaces, up 55 percent from 1,035 in 2018. In June 2025, long after respiratory season, the figure was 1,366 — up 65 per cent from June 2018, the month the Progressive Conservatives took office.

Hallway health care is growing faster than the population

Overall numbers obscure the effects of population growth, especially at a time when the province has been rapidly adding new residents. Ontario’s population hit 16.1 million in January 2026, up about 13 per cent from the start of 2018.

But even adjusting for more people, Ontario’s hallway health-care problem has outpaced population growth.

Ontario hospitals treated 7.2 patients per 100,000 people on an average day in all of 2018. By 2025, the full-year average climbed to 9.9 patients per 100,000 residents — a 37 per cent increase.

The same holds true when isolating for seniors aged 65 and older, the demographic most likely to need a hospital bed. Between 2018 and 2025, Ontario’s senior population grew by 27 per cent, reaching over three million in 2025.

In 2018, Ontario hospitals treated an average of 43 hallway patients for every 100,000 seniors. By 2025, the rate jumped to 52 hallway patients per 100,000, a 21 per cent increase over eight years — but still well below the overall 37 per cent increase.

“I remember when we hit 1,000 people so sick that they had to be kept in the hospital, yet we put them in the hallway, in a TV room, anywhere but a bed,” said NDP health critic France Gélinas. “Now we’ve doubled this.”

Liberal MPP Adil Shamji, one of the party’s health critics, said hallway health care has become the Ford government’s “hallmark failure.” With the numbers showing hallway patient growth is outpacing population growth, “the problem is only going to get worse,” Shamji added.

Not just a big-city problem

Hallway health-care numbers are, naturally, worst in big cities with large populations.

Ten hospital corporations account for about half the provincial total. Trillium Health Partners averaged 161 patients in January 2026, up from 84 eight years earlier. William Osler Health System went from 76 to 154, while Lakeridge Health went from 57 to 90.

But the problem isn’t isolated to urban centres.

Between January 2025 and February 2026, 33 of the 136 active hospital corporations tracked in the data hit their all-time peak. Brockville General Hospital averaged 23.5 in January 2026, having never averaged above six before 2025.

Overcrowded hospital hallways are also becoming more common.

In January 2026, 44 hospital corporations had an average of 10 or more hallway patients a day, an over 25 per cent increase from the 35 hospitals that hit that mark in January 2018.

While both the overall and population-adjusted figures show a province-wide problem getting worse, some have managed to drive their numbers down.

Between January 2018 and January 2026, 23 hospital corporations saw their numbers improve.

Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre stands out, cutting its numbers by 67 per cent, from 56 down to 19. Joseph Brant Hospital also saw a significant 55 per cent decrease from 23.5 to 10.5.

Some larger networks also managed declines while still grappling with high overall numbers.

Hamilton Health Sciences fell from 135 to 111, and the Niagara Health System dropped from 92 to 75 — both about 18 per cent declines.

What the Ford government says

Though the situation is getting worse, the Ford government has introduced a suite of policies to attack the problem from different directions.

Health Minister Sylvia Jones’s office did not address a detailed list of questions. Instead, spokesperson Lily Barnes provided a statement.

“Our government is taking action and making record investments to make it easier and faster for people to connect to care,” she said.

Barnes touted higher hospital spending.

“We have made record investments in our hospital sector, increasing funding by four per cent for the third year in a row, bringing our total investment increase to hospitals to over 50 per cent since 2018, adding 3,500 new hospital beds since 2020, and we are getting shovels in the ground for 60 hospital development projects that will add 3,000 more,” she said.

Further, allowing pharmacists to treat minor conditions, spending more on home care, primary care and expanding paramedicine programs is “connecting more people to care in the right setting,” she said.

Ontario Health says the number of patients waiting in hospital beds for care elsewhere in the health-care system, such as a long-term care home, is at the lowest level since 2015. These patients are known as alternate-level-of-care (ALC).

That has freed up “the equivalent capacity of two large community hospitals over the last year and we have reduced emergency department volumes by nearly 200,000,” Barnes said.

While the average wait time for an initial assessment by a doctor in an emergency department was 1.7 hours in January 2026, hallway patients are admitted patients, and those numbers are less encouraging.

In January 2026, admitted patients spent an average of 20.3 hours waiting in the ER. The figures have come down to an average of 18.5 hours in August 2026, but that’s still up nearly an hour from August 2025. Just 27 per cent of patients are admitted within the province’s eight-hour target.

What the hospitals say

The Trillium asked hospitals and hospital corporations to explain their numbers. Several did not respond or declined interviews.

North York General said patients “may be moved to different rooms, floors or designated hallway spaces” when volumes spike, a decision it said is made with patient safety in mind. Its January 2026 count, 35 a day, was little changed from a year earlier.

University Health Network (UHN) said admissions are up 7.5 per cent since 2019-20, but that it has cut its ALC rate by about a third and days above 100 per cent capacity by more than a third.

“The story is not simply about how many people are waiting today,” a UHN spokesperson said. “It is about whether the system is moving patients through care more effectively.”

Ontario Health’s data back part of that. UHN’s count fell from a record 49 in January 2025 to 36 a year later, though its winter average was flat.

Halton Healthcare said it cut its use of “overflow care spaces” by more than 55 per cent last winter through a command centre, short-stay units, care at home and fewer ALC patients.

Halton’s numbers spiked in January 2020, with 74 patients per day. The post-pandemic highs came in November 2023 and January 2025, with patient loads in the high 60s. In Winter 2026, the average patient load was down in the mid to low-50s.

The Ottawa Hospital prepares “temporary unconventional spaces” during peak periods “to help improve ambulance offload time and patient flow throughout the hospital,” a spokesperson said.

“These spaces are always adjusted and monitored to maintain patient safety, comfort and experience.”

No way out

Getting into a hospital is easy. Getting out can be anything but.

After all the treatment is done, some patients stay stuck in the hospital because they lack access to post-hospital care, such as space in a long-term care home or an assisted living facility. These are known as alternate-level-of-care (ALC) patients.

“These delays in discharge extend hospital stays and reduce bed availability for patients waiting to be admitted from the ED, limiting patient flow across the system,” reads a 2026 report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).

When ALC patients occupy hospital beds, new entries can be forced into hallways.

Jones’s office did not provide up-to-date figures on the number of ALC patients in Ontario hospitals.

The average amount of time an ALC patient spent in a hospital bed steadily rose from 16.7 days in 2021 to 18.3 in 2025, according to CIHI data, but went back down to 16.5 in 2026.

In 2022, the Ford government introduced controversial legislation, the More Beds, Better Care Act, to ease the ALC burden. It allowed placement coordinators to put ALC patients in long-term care homes they didn’t choose, up to 70 kilometres away, or face a $400 daily fine. Over 7,300 ALC patients were transferred to long-term care homes in the six months after the bill came into effect, according to a recent Ontario auditor general report.

While the Ford government spent political capital getting the bill through, it has also spent actual capital building out the province’s long-term care system to free up more space in hospitals.

The Financial Accountability Officer (FAO) recently estimated Ontario has over 82,000 long-term care beds, expected to grow to over 88,000 by 2029.

But Ontario’s aging population is growing faster.

The FAO estimated the number of long-term care beds per 1,000 residents aged 75 and over is expected to drop from 59 today to 57 in three years, based on current funding levels. The numbers have come down dramatically from 2016-17, when Ontario had nearly 80 beds per 1,000 residents aged 75 and above.

ALC patients don’t just add strain to an already overburdened health-care system. Being an ALC patient creates risks itself.

“When people are designated ALC in the hospital, they stop getting active rehabilitation,… so they’re more at risk for hospital-related harm and deconditioning and falls,” said Sara Guilcher, a University of Toronto professor specializing in hallway health care. “It creates this really bad cycle.”

Ontario’s bed shortage isn’t limited to long-term care homes, even as the Ford government continues to spend on new and upgraded hospital facilities.

According to the FAO, Ontario’s funded hospital beds were 221 per 100,000 residents in both 2016-17 and 2025-26.

The FAO projects it will get worse before it gets better. Under the 2026 budget’s spending plan, funded beds would fall by 2,407 by 2028-29, to 205 per 100,000.

Health spending grew 7.4 per cent a year from 2022-23 to 2025-26, but is now projected to grow slower, at 3.2 per cent per year. To maintain current service levels, spending would need to increase by 4.4 percent annually, according to the FAO.

A dearth of doctors

Ontario isn’t just facing a shortage of hospital and long-term care beds. Millions of people lack a family doctor, and poor access to primary care can lead people to the emergency department as a room of last resort.

A 2025 auditor general report found about two million people — 12 per cent of the population — had no family doctor. Just over 10 per cent of those without a family doctor are registered with Ontario Health Care Connect, the centralized system built to connect patients with providers.

Shifting demographics within the profession compounds the shortage, according to Michael Decter, who served as Ontario’s deputy minister of health from 1995 to 1998 and sat on Ford’s council to end hallway medicine.

“The Boomer doctors are retiring,” Decter said. “There are lots of family doctors that put in long hours, look after people. The new doctors graduating are not, for the most part, interested in having that big outpatient burden on them.”

A 2025 Ontario Medical Association survey found over half of Ontario doctors are considering retirement in the next five years. But recent data from the Canadian Resident Matching Service shows growing interest in the discipline among medical students after years of decline, with fewer residency positions going unmatched.

The Tories have poured billions of dollars into the system over their eight-year tenure and connected 511,000 new people to a primary care provider in the last two years as part of a plan to get all Ontarians a family doctor by 2029.

The FAO report said the money already committed would “be sufficient to achieve this objective,” with the number of funded physicians per 100,000 residents expected to climb from 233 this year to 254 by 2029.

Unhealthy politics

For Decter, part of the problem behind Ontario’s worsening hallway health-care woes is political.

“It’s hard to cut a ribbon on the community,” he said. “It’s easy to cut a ribbon on a new shiny hospital, so we built them.”

Upstream solutions, such as better access to home care and mental health care, would help divert patients away from hospitals, he said.

“We keep spending more and more and we don’t fix the underlying fundamental problems, which are that people need a different mix of services than we’re giving them,” he said.

Guilcher agreed, arguing, “if we just keep focusing on the hospitals, we’re just not identifying what’s causing the fire in the first place.”

“If we focus on prevention upstream — how do we think about helping people maintain their balance, maintain their function, maintain their strength, maintain their independence in the places that they want to live?— That, ultimately, will be the key issue,” she said.

But another respiratory season is months away. Recent winters have pushed the system to the brink, with more than 2,000 patients treated in unconventional spaces for the first time — a trend with few signs of slowing down.