Why Walk-In Clinics Are Busier Than Ever (And How to Handle the Volume)

If you operate or work in a Canadian walk-in clinic, you already know. The waiting rooms are fuller. The days are longer. The patients keep coming. Walk-in clinic patient volume across Canada has reached levels that many clinic owners describe as unprecedented, and the data backs them up. This is not a temporary post pandemic surge. It is a structural shift driven by forces that are not going away anytime soon.

This article examines why walk-in clinic volumes are at all-time highs, what the consequences are for clinics that cannot keep up, and most importantly, what clinics can do about it. The answer is not simply "see more patients faster." It is see them smarter.

For the systemic factors driving this trend, see our comprehensive guide to the family doctor shortage and its impact on walk-in clinics.

Walk-In Volumes at All-Time Highs

The numbers tell the story. Walk-in clinics across Canada are reporting patient volumes that exceed anything they have experienced before. This is not uniform. Some regions and some clinics are hit harder than others, but the trend is national.

Several data points frame the picture:

6.5 million Canadians lack a family doctor according to the Canadian Medical Association. That number has been climbing steadily and represents nearly one in six Canadians.
The median wait time for specialist referrals in Canada is 30 weeks per the Fraser Institute, the longest ever recorded. When patients cannot access specialists, they return to walk-in clinics for ongoing management of conditions that would traditionally be handled in specialist or family practice settings.
Walk-in clinic wait times in Ontario average 59 minutes and in British Columbia average 93 minutes according to Medimap. These averages mask wide variation. Some clinics regularly see two hour waits during peak periods.
30% of walk-in clinic patients leave without being seen (LWBS) due to long waits, per industry data. This means the visible demand (patients in the waiting room) understates actual demand (patients who showed up but left).

Walk-in clinics are not just busy. They are operating beyond the capacity they were designed for.

Why the Surge: Five Forces Driving Volume

The volume increase is not the result of a single factor. It is the convergence of five forces, each of which is intensifying.

1. The Family Doctor Shortage

This is the primary driver. With 6.5 million Canadians unattached to a family doctor, and that number growing as physicians retire, reduce hours, or shift to non-clinical roles, walk-in clinics absorb the overflow. These are not patients making a lifestyle choice to use walk-in care. They are patients who have tried to find a family doctor and cannot.

The shortage is particularly acute in rural and suburban areas, but urban centres are feeling it too. In some regions, family practice waitlists have been closed for years. Walk-in clinics are, functionally, the primary care system for a growing segment of the population.

2. Population Growth and Immigration

Canada's population growth has accelerated significantly, driven largely by immigration. The country added over one million people in a single year for the first time in its history. New residents need healthcare, and most do not have a family doctor when they arrive. Walk-in clinics are their first point of contact with the Canadian healthcare system.

This creates a unique challenge. Many new immigrants are young and relatively healthy, but they have healthcare needs: immunization records that need updating, health screenings, acute illness, and workplace injury treatment. They also often face language barriers, unfamiliarity with the Canadian healthcare system, and limited knowledge of what services walk-in clinics can and cannot provide.

3. Post-COVID Delayed and Deferred Care

During the pandemic, millions of Canadians delayed or deferred routine care, preventive screenings, and management of chronic conditions. As the healthcare system has reopened, this backlog is surfacing. Patients who skipped two years of diabetes management, hypertension follow-ups, or mental health care are presenting at walk-in clinics with conditions that are more advanced and more complex than they would have been with consistent care.

This delayed care effect is not a one time surge. It is an ongoing wave as patients with increasingly complex presentations work through the system. Walk-in physicians report seeing more multi complaint visits and more patients with poorly managed chronic conditions than before the pandemic.

4. More Complex Presentations

Walk-in clinics were historically associated with simple, acute complaints: sore throats, sprained ankles, ear infections. That profile is shifting.

Without family doctors to manage chronic conditions, walk-in clinics are increasingly handling:

Diabetes management and medication adjustments
Hypertension monitoring and treatment
Mental health assessments and medication management
Complex multi system complaints
Geriatric medicine for older patients without a GP
Follow-up care that would traditionally happen in a family practice

These presentations take longer. A straightforward upper respiratory infection might take eight minutes. A patient with uncontrolled diabetes, hypertension, anxiety, and three medications that need adjusting can take 25 minutes or more. As the proportion of complex visits increases, the effective throughput of the clinic decreases, even if the total number of patients remains the same.

5. Emergency Department Avoidance

Canadian emergency departments are under enormous pressure, with wait times that routinely exceed four to six hours for non-urgent presentations. Patients are increasingly choosing walk-in clinics over EDs for complaints that are urgent but not emergent, a strategy that makes clinical sense but adds volume to walk-in clinics that are already stretched.

Provincial governments have actively encouraged this shift, directing patients with non-emergency complaints to walk-in clinics and urgent care centres rather than EDs. The intent is sound, but the result is additional volume redirected to walk-in clinics without corresponding increases in walk-in clinic capacity or resources.

The Consequences of Unmanaged Volume

When walk-in clinic patient volume exceeds capacity, the effects cascade:

Longer Wait Times

This is the most visible consequence. As volume increases without a corresponding increase in throughput, wait times grow. Ontario's 59-minute average and British Columbia's 93-minute average are symptoms of a system operating at or beyond capacity. During peak hours, waits of two to three hours are common in high-volume clinics.

Patients Leaving Without Being Seen

When wait times become intolerable, patients leave. The 30% LWBS rate is a staggering number. For a clinic that registers 50 patients on a given day, 15 walk out before seeing a doctor. Some of those patients go to an ED instead (increasing ED burden). Some go home and self-treat (sometimes appropriately, sometimes not). Some defer care entirely (with potentially serious consequences for conditions that need timely attention).

LWBS is not just a quality issue. It is a revenue issue. Every patient who leaves is a visit that was not billed. For strategies to reduce LWBS, see our article on why patients leave walk-in clinics and how to stop it.

Staff Burnout

Walk-in clinic staff, physicians, nurses, and receptionists, are burning out. The Canadian Medical Association's 2021 National Physician Health Survey found that 53% of physicians reported high levels of burnout. Walk-in clinic physicians, who see the highest daily patient volumes with the least continuity and support, are among the most affected.

Burned-out physicians reduce their hours, leave walk-in practice, or retire early. Burned-out receptionists quit. The result is a vicious cycle: higher volume leads to burnout, burnout leads to reduced staffing, reduced staffing leads to even longer waits and higher volume per remaining staff member.

Declining Patient Satisfaction

Patients who wait 90 minutes to see a doctor who appears rushed and has no context about their complaint are not satisfied patients. They leave negative reviews. They tell friends and family. They switch to competing clinics. In a competitive walk-in clinic market, patient satisfaction is directly tied to patient retention and clinic viability.

Quality Risks

When physicians are seeing more patients than they can comfortably handle, something gives. History-taking becomes abbreviated. Documentation becomes incomplete. Follow-up instructions become hurried. The risk of missed diagnoses, incomplete workups, and inadequate documentation increases with volume pressure.

"See More Faster" Is Not the Answer

The instinctive response to high volume is to speed up. See more patients. Shorten visits. Move faster. This approach has a ceiling, and most walk-in clinics have already hit it.

A physician who is already seeing 40 patients in an 8-hour shift is spending an average of 12 minutes per patient encounter. There is not much room to compress that further without compromising care quality. And the consequences of doing so (missed diagnoses, incomplete charts, patient complaints, malpractice risk) far outweigh any throughput gains.

The answer is not to see more patients faster. It is to see them smarter, eliminating the waste in the current workflow so that the time physicians spend is more productive.

Where the Waste Is

The walk-in clinic workflow contains significant waste that, once identified, can be targeted:

The Cold Start Problem

Every walk-in patient encounter starts from zero. The physician walks into the room with, at best, a one-line complaint from a paper form. The first three to five minutes are spent gathering baseline information: chief complaint, history of present illness, medications, allergies, past medical history. This happens 30 to 50 times per day, every day, for every physician.

That is one to four hours of physician time per day spent on information that the patient already knows and could provide before the encounter begins.

Idle Waiting Room Time

While patients wait 59 to 93 minutes on average, they are doing nothing productive. They are sitting in a chair, checking their phone, growing frustrated. The waiting room time is currently pure waste, for the patient and for the clinic.

Repetitive Documentation

Each encounter requires documentation. Without a structured starting point, the physician builds the chart note from scratch. Much of the content (demographics, history, medications, allergies) is the same information that was gathered verbally at the start of the visit. The physician documents it once while talking to the patient and then again (or references their memory) when charting afterward.

Manual Triage and Prioritization

Most walk-in clinics see patients in order of arrival. A patient with a minor cold and a patient with chest tightness wait in the same queue. Without structured pre-screening data, the clinic has no systematic way to prioritize patients by acuity, leading to situations where urgent presentations wait unnecessarily while routine ones are seen first.

Solutions: How to Handle Walk-In Clinic Patient Volume

The clinics that are thriving despite rising volumes are not working harder. They are working differently. Here are the strategies that move the needle.

AI Pre-Screening: Eliminate the Cold Start

AI powered pre-screening is the single most impactful intervention for high volume walk-in clinics. The concept is simple: patients interact with a tablet during their wait time, answering adaptive questions about their symptoms, medical history, medications, and allergies. By the time the physician enters the room, they have a structured clinical summary that would have taken three to eight minutes to gather verbally.

Research on digital intake shows 15 minutes saved per patient versus paper workflows, per the Journal of Medical Internet Research. At 40 patients per day with a conservative 5-minute saving per encounter, that is 3.3 hours of recovered physician time, enough to see 6 to 8 additional patients daily without extending hours.

For a detailed look at how AI pre-screening works in practice, see how AI pre-screening works step by step.

Queue Management and Wait-Time Transparency

Patients who know their estimated wait time are more likely to stay. Simple queue management tools (position in line updates, text notifications when the wait is nearly over, estimated wait times visible on the clinic's website) reduce LWBS without requiring any clinical workflow changes.

Some clinics have implemented virtual queuing, allowing patients to check in remotely and arrive when their turn is approaching. This reduces waiting room congestion and improves the patient experience.

For additional strategies on improving patient flow, see our article on how to improve patient flow at your walk-in clinic.

Data Driven Scheduling and Staffing

Walk-in clinics, by definition, do not have appointment schedules. But that does not mean demand is unpredictable. Most clinics have clear patterns: busier on Mondays, quieter on Fridays, a morning rush, a post-work surge.

Clinics that track and analyze their volume patterns can staff accordingly, adding a second physician during predictable peak periods, adjusting receptionist schedules to match demand curves, and even communicating expected wait times to potential patients in real time to distribute demand more evenly across the day.

Acuity Based Prioritization

AI pre-screening enables something that paper intake cannot: systematic acuity based prioritization. When the system collects structured symptom data before the physician encounter, it can flag patients with red flag symptoms for earlier assessment. The patient with chest tightness does not wait behind 12 patients with routine complaints.

This is not full emergency triage. Walk-in clinics are not EDs. But basic acuity awareness, informed by structured pre-screening data, improves both patient safety and workflow efficiency.

Streamlined Documentation

Documentation that starts from a structured pre-screening summary is faster to complete than documentation built from scratch. When the AI system has already captured the history of present illness, medications, allergies, and relevant negatives in a clinical format, the physician's charting task shifts from creation to verification and supplementation. This saves time on every chart, compounding across the full day.

The Opportunity: Clinics That Handle Volume Thrive

The walk-in clinic landscape in Canada is at a turning point. Demand is rising and will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. The family doctor shortage is not resolving quickly. Population growth continues. Post-pandemic deferred care continues to surface. Emergency department avoidance continues.

Clinics that cannot handle the volume will struggle. Wait times will grow. LWBS rates will climb. Staff will burn out and leave. Patient satisfaction will drop. Some clinics will close, and the patients they served will add to the burden on remaining clinics, accelerating the cycle.

Clinics that can handle the volume will thrive. They will attract patients from clinics that cannot keep up. They will attract physicians who prefer to work in well run, technology enabled practices. They will generate more revenue from higher throughput. And they will serve the community more effectively at a time when the community desperately needs them.

The difference between these two outcomes is not luck or location. It is whether clinics invest in the tools that turn volume from a burden into an opportunity.

The technology exists. AI pre-screening is available today, built specifically for the Canadian walk-in clinic context. 93% of consumers prefer healthcare providers that offer digital tools (Accenture, 2024). The AI symptom checker market is growing from $1.45 billion to $3.6 billion by 2029 (MarketsandMarkets). Already, 40% of urgent care centres have adopted AI triage (Becker's Hospital Review).

The volume is coming regardless. The question is whether your clinic is ready.

FAQ

Why are walk-in clinics so much busier now than five years ago?

The primary driver is the family doctor shortage, which has intensified significantly. With 6.5 million Canadians now lacking a family doctor, up from previous years, walk-in clinics are absorbing millions of visits that would traditionally have been handled in family practices. This is compounded by rapid population growth (including record immigration levels), post COVID deferred care surfacing as more complex presentations, and provincial policies directing patients away from emergency departments toward walk-in and urgent care facilities. These factors are structural, not cyclical, meaning volumes are unlikely to decrease on their own.

What is a healthy LWBS rate for a walk-in clinic?

Industry data places the average LWBS rate at approximately 30%, which is widely considered unacceptably high. Best in class walk-in clinics aim for LWBS rates below 10%. Any rate above 15-20% signals a significant throughput or wait time problem that is costing the clinic both revenue and patient trust. The most effective interventions for reducing LWBS are shortening actual wait times (through AI pre-screening and workflow optimization) and improving perceived wait times (through queue management and wait time transparency).

Can walk-in clinics handle complex patients effectively?

Yes, but it requires better tools and more structured workflows than most walk-in clinics currently have. Walk-in physicians are broadly trained and capable of handling complex presentations. The challenge is not clinical competence. It is time and information. A complex patient visit that should take 20 minutes gets compressed into 12 because of volume pressure. AI pre-screening helps by ensuring the physician starts complex encounters with comprehensive information, reducing the time spent on information gathering and allowing more time for clinical assessment and management.

How many patients should a walk-in clinic physician see per day?

There is no universal standard, but most walk-in clinic physicians in Canada see between 30 and 50 patients per 8-hour shift, with 35-45 being the most common range. The appropriate number depends on patient complexity, support staff availability, and workflow efficiency. The goal should not be to maximize headcount but to maximize the number of patients who receive high quality, complete care. AI pre-screening can increase effective capacity by 15-25% without increasing hours or compromising quality, because it eliminates the most time intensive non-clinical component of each visit.

What should a clinic do if it cannot handle its current volume?

Start with the interventions that have the fastest impact and lowest implementation cost. AI pre-screening addresses the biggest single time waste in the walk-in workflow and can be operational within days. Queue management tools can reduce LWBS immediately. Volume pattern analysis can inform smarter staffing decisions within weeks. These are not multi year transformation projects. They are targeted tools that deliver measurable results quickly. The longer a clinic waits to address volume challenges, the harder the problem becomes as staff burn out and patients migrate to better run competitors.

Volume does not have to mean chaos. Hilthealth is an AI powered pre-screening system built for the reality of high volume Canadian walk-in clinics. Turn your busiest days into your most efficient ones. See our guide to improving patient flow, learn about the wait time crisis across Canada, or contact us to see how Hilthealth handles volume for clinics like yours.