Canadian pediatric emergency departments overrun in 2022?

Not up to March 2022, according to CIHI/NACRS

The Canadian Institute for Health Information released a report on December 8, 2022 regarding emergency department visits and length of stay. This data is derived from the National Ambulatory Care Reporting System (NACRS). In their summary notes, CIHI states:

“While ED visits climbed to near pre-pandemic volumes across all age groups, the largest increase was observed in the youngest age group (0 to 4 years), where volumes almost doubled — from just over 567,000 in 2020–2021 to more than 1 million in 2021–2022.”

If I had written this report, I would probably have phrased it differently, as this implies a major crisis of some kind among newborns and toddlers. Here is a subset of the data that this report links to: (note that this refers to fiscal years, i.e. March to March)

As we can see, there was a major drop in ER visits for newborns and toddlers during fiscal year 2020/21, presumably related to covid lockdowns. In 2022, we see that ER visits among this age group start to reach pre-pandemic levels.

It will be interesting to see visit volumes for 2022/23, when widespread covid vaccination for these children began.