Explore the emergency room closures in your area with our interactive map

Globe and Mail

17 hours ago

This project aims to document every instance in which a hospital emergency department (ER) in Canada closed its doors – temporarily or permanently – since 2019. For each closure, The Globe and Mail captured the ER's name, start and end times, and the reason for the disruption.
Explore the interactive map below to browse ER closures across Canada, as compiled by The Globe and Mail.
The analysis focuses exclusively on emergency departments. It does not include closures or service interruptions at walk-in clinics, urgent care centres or community health centres. To compile a complete list, The Globe asked each province and territory for a list of all ERs under their jurisdiction.
If an ER was permanently closed or converted to a clinic, its closure hours were no longer counted beyond that point.
Closures were classified into three categories:
These are unplanned, one-off disruptions. An ER is considered temporarily closed if it shuts down with little advance notice and the closure does not follow a recurring schedule.
Recurring reductions in service hours (e.g., overnight or weekend closures) that persisted for at least two consecutive months. Short-term reductions – such as during holidays – were still considered temporary.
Importantly, scheduled closures that began before 2019, the starting point of this project, are not included in this analysis. This is to avoid attributing long-standing schedules as new disruptions.
In some jurisdictions, the data did not distinguish between scheduled and temporary closures. In such cases, all disruptions were grouped under a general 'ER closures' category.
These occur when an ER remains physically open but is unable to provide full emergency services. Common examples include:
Some records lacked specific start or end times. In those cases, The Globe imputed missing values using the average duration of similar disruptions at the same ER. This approach was used in:
Health authorities in the territories reported no closures of service disruptions.