Emergency departments across Canada are seeing record patient volumes, bed shortages and overcrowding. A new longitudinal study in CMAJ, "Emergency physician burnout and attrition in Canada: a longitudinal study," finds physician burnout now above pandemic-era levels and driving reduced hours and departures from the specialty.

Dr. Kerstin de Wit, the study's lead author, an emergency physician and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at Queen's University, reports that 65% of respondents to the January 2025 survey had high burnout levels, slightly higher than at the pandemic peak in December 2020, a  statistically significant difference. Participants described the health care system as broken, with chronic overcrowding forcing physicians to examine patients in corridors and waiting rooms as quality of care slips. Half the cohort had reduced shifts, 20% had stepped away from emergency medicine for a time, and 10% had left and not returned. She also describes physicians coping by detaching from responsibility for a situation they feel powerless to change.

Dr. Jillian Horton, associate chair of internal medicine at the University of Manitoba and author of We Are All Perfectly Fine, teaches an evidence-based program for physicians in distress. She argues that organizational factors drive 80% to 90% of burnout and individual factors closer to 10%, and that wellness efforts fail when they focus on individual-level solutions. Physicians now reject the language of resilience, she says, so she focuses on meaning, citing research that physicians who spend at least 20% of their time on the work they find most meaningful have half the burnout risk of physicians who spend less.

The study puts the cause in the system, which limits what any one physician can fix alone. Physicians can still protect the most meaningful parts of their work, which the research links to lower burnout risk.

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