More than 3.1 million Canadians on health care waitlist amid crisis

There have been health care workers on those picket lines which could help explain why some Quebec ERs are backed up. But wait times are also a problem in other provinces this holiday season. CTV's Kamal Karamaly checks in on what doctors are doing to try and keep up. It's the holiday hangover hospitals have been dreading. An overburdened health care system pushed even further. Usually in the department we'd say see 200, 250 people but we're seeing three, 350 people so like 50 percent more than normal in the last couple of days. Brought on by a surge of viral illnesses. There's been a lot of influence of course there's still RSV of course there's still COVID but we've been seeing a lot of influenza coming in the front doors. In Winnipeg emergency wait times ranging from eight to more than 11 hours. Montfort hospital in Ottawa also seeing a more than 11 hour wait. In Montreal several hospitals well over capacity including one more than doubling its occupancy rate. I played shuffle the beds almost all day yesterday to try and find spaces to be able to examine people because we were just waiting for the beds to open up upstairs and there are none. The problem made worse by a lack of family physicians. This Ottawa mother still searching for a family doctor to prescribe her kids ADHD medication. Their doctors won't prescribe that medication because it's considered a controlled substance so we're stuck going into emerge and waiting and emerge when it's a non-emergency issue. This comes just as new data shows more than three million Canadians are stuck waiting for health care services. Nearly 1.5 million waiting for diagnostic care. More than a million need to see a specialist and 600,000 plus waiting for surgeries. The data that governments provide it has a lot of holes in it so we think the true totals were close to about five million people waiting in this country. Meanwhile health experts are expecting the number of patients at emergency departments to climb even higher with the spread of respiratory viruses set to peak in January. Marilla? All right Kamal, thanks for that.