Thessalon and Richards Landing ERs Have Closed 24 Times in 2026

The 2026 record so far (January 1 to October 22)

• 24 closures at North Shore Health Network’s Thessalon and Richards Landing emergency departments
• 834 hours closed, more than the 825 hours the network’s CEO cited for 2025
• Thessalon: 20 closures, 714 hours, about 30 full days
• May 5–6: both emergency departments were closed at the same time

Thessalon’s emergency department has closed 20 times so far in 2026, for a total of 714 announced hours. The Richards Landing emergency department on St. Joseph Island has closed four times, for 120 hours. Together that’s 834 hours, already more than the 825 hours North Shore Health Network (NSHN) reported for 2025 as of late December.

No one else has published this tally. We built it by reading every 2026 post on NSHN’s Facebook page, 154 in all, and checking each closure against NSHN’s own press releases and local news coverage. Every closure is listed at the bottom of this page with a link to its source.

In an emergency, call 911. Paramedics know which emergency departments are open.

How many times have the ERs closed in 2026?

Thessalon has closed far more often than any other emergency department in the area. Here’s the count from January 1 to October 22, 2026.

Emergency department	Closures	Hours closed	Longest closure
Thessalon	20	714	72 hours (twice, in March)
Richards Landing (Matthews Memorial)	4	120	48 hours (May 9–11)
Blind River	1	not published	a few hours on April 4
Lady Dunn Health Centre, Wawa	0	0	none

Thessalon was closed for part of 49 different days this year. That works out to about 10% of all the hours in 2026 so far. In January, February and March alone, it was closed 480 of 2,160 hours, or 22% of the time.

Every closure NSHN announced cited physician shortages. Blind River’s April 4 closure was blamed on “weather-related physician shortages.”

Month by month: most closures came before mid-May

The closures were heavily concentrated in the first half of the year. About 95% of Thessalon’s closed hours (676 of 714) fell between January and mid-May.

Month	Thessalon closures	Thessalon hours	Richards Landing closures	Richards Landing hours
January	5	168	0	0
February	3	72	0	0
March	5	240	0	0
April	4	124	1	16
May	2	72	2	80
June	0	0	0	0
July	1	38	0	0
August	0	0	0	0
September	0	0	0	0
October (to the 22nd)	0	0	1	24

Hours are split by the month they fell in. April 30’s Richards Landing closure ran into May 1.

Since mid-May, Thessalon has closed once (July 2–3, with a nurse practitioner on site). That change lines up with two things. In February, the Town of Thessalon and the Municipality of Huron Shores launched a community-led physician recruitment campaign. Then on May 13 the town announced that a locum doctor had signed on to join the Thessalon clinic from June and keep covering the emergency department. The timing fits, but nobody has said publicly that one caused the other.

Richards Landing has not followed the same pattern. It closed again on October 9 for 24 hours.

May 5–6: both Central Algoma ERs closed at once

From 8 a.m. on May 5 to 8 a.m. on May 6, neither Thessalon nor Richards Landing was open. NSHN’s May 3 notice told the public that ambulances would go to Blind River or Sault Area Hospital.

That left the stretch of Highway 17 between Blind River and the Sault, about 147 km by road, without an open emergency department. It had not happened before. In December 2025, NSHN’s then-CEO Tim Vine told CBC Sudbury that the two sites had “never been closed at the same time.”

Closures that were announced, then called off

Not every warning ended in a closure. NSHN announced six closures that it later cancelled after finding coverage, and it reopened Thessalon 20 hours early on April 2. We did not count any of these.

Site	Planned closure	What happened
Richards Landing	Jan 8–9	Cancelled, physician found
Thessalon	Jan 24	Cancelled (possible closure tied to winter travel delays)
Thessalon	Feb 22–23	Cancelled
Thessalon	Apr 2–3	Reopened 20 hours early
Richards Landing	May 29–June 1 (72 hours)	Cancelled
Richards Landing	June 4–5	Cancelled
Thessalon	June 5–6	Cancelled

This matters for anyone who plans around the notices. Closures are often announced the day before, then extended, shortened or called off. NSHN’s Facebook page is where updates appear first.

Where to go when Thessalon or Richards Landing is closed

When one site is closed, the nearest open emergency department is usually 50 to 90 km away. These distances are road distances between the hospital addresses, worked out with OpenStreetMap routing. Travel times are estimates for clear roads, not winter conditions.

From	To the nearest alternatives	Distance	Approximate time by road
Thessalon	Richards Landing	50 km	49 minutes
Thessalon	Blind River	57 km	53 minutes
Thessalon	Sault Area Hospital	91 km	1 hour 25 minutes
Richards Landing	Sault Area Hospital	64 km	1 hour
Richards Landing	Blind River	107 km	1 hour 38 minutes
Blind River	Sault Area Hospital	147 km	2 hours 13 minutes

For anything urgent, call 911 instead of heading out on your own. Paramedics are routed to whichever emergency department is open.

What about Wawa, Blind River, Hornepayne and Chapleau?

Wawa’s Lady Dunn Health Centre has not closed its emergency department in 2026. It posted five staffing-pressure notices this year (January 1, March 25, July 13, October 12 and October 16), as reported by Wawa-news. Each time the emergency department stayed open and asked people to come only for true emergencies.

Blind River closed once, on the morning of April 4. NSHN never published when that closure started, and the reopening time differs between sources, so we haven’t counted its hours.

We found no 2026 closures at Hornepayne Community Hospital or Chapleau Health Services, but we could not find a reliable public record for either. If you know of a closure at either site, tell us.

How 2026 compares with past years

The 2026 total is already higher than either of the past two years, based on the figures NSHN has given publicly.

• 2024: 137 hours closed at Thessalon and Richards Landing combined.
• 2025: 825 hours “so far,” as of December 23, 2025.
• 2026: 834 hours by October 22, with more than two months left.

The 2024 and 2025 figures come from NSHN’s CEO in the CBC Sudbury report.

For scale, Ontario’s Ministry of Health told Global News that emergency departments across the whole province were closed 53 times for 774 hours in 2024, according to figures reposted by the Ontario Health Coalition. Thessalon and Richards Landing alone have passed that hour count in 2026. The years differ and the ministry may count closures differently, so treat this as a rough comparison.

CTV Northern Ontario has reported that between 60 and 70% of Ontario’s emergency department closures happen at these two sites. CTV did not say where that figure came from, and we could not confirm it.

What’s being done

Three efforts are under way, and none of them has a finish date yet.

Recruiting doctors locally. Thessalon and Huron Shores launched a Practice Ready Ontario recruitment campaign in February 2026. CTV reported that supervising a new physician costs about $60,000 over 8 to 12 months, with Thessalon putting in up to $40,000. Mayor Jordan Bird said the town’s clinic had run “solely on locums” for four years.

A new Central Algoma hospital. On August 17, the NSHN board endorsed formal planning for a single hospital to replace the Thessalon and Richards Landing sites, with full emergency services. At its September 29 meeting, the board endorsed “in principle” a new hospital for the western part of its area plus a renovation in Blind River. NSHN calls this “a planning direction only.” Details are on NSHN’s future planning page. CEO Dave Murray told CTV a ribbon-cutting could be “three or four years from now.”

Provincial programs. Algoma–Manitoulin MPP Bill Rosenberg wrote in a February letter that NSHN’s provincial funding has risen more than $7 million since 2018. He pointed to rural emergency coverage and physician programs. Ontario Health says it issued an operational direction on emergency department closures in March 2026, mentioned in its fall and winter direction, but the March document itself isn’t public.

Health care is one of the issues facing every council candidate in this month’s municipal elections, including Wawa’s.

How we built this record

We used NSHN’s own announcements as the main source, then checked them against other records.

• Source: all 154 posts on NSHN’s Facebook page from January 2 to October 21, 2026, collected with a scraping tool and read individually.
• Cross-checks: NSHN press releases reposted by Hilton Township, SooToday articles, CTV and CBC coverage.
• What the hours mean: each closure’s hours are NSHN’s announced window (usually 8 a.m. to 8 a.m.), updated for every extension or early reopening it posted. They are not an audited log. If a site reopened early without a public update, our count would be slightly high.
• Nurse practitioner coverage: during six closures a nurse practitioner was on site for limited hours. NSHN still called each one a formal emergency department closure, so we counted them.
• Thin sourcing: three closures (January 5, January 16 and May 1) rest on NSHN’s Facebook post alone. We found no notice that they were cancelled.

NSHN has not confirmed these totals. If it corrects them, we’ll update this page. With the loss of daily print papers in the region, records like this are getting harder to find in one place. We wrote about that in When the Presses Stop.

The full 2026 closure log

#	Site	Dates	Hours	Source
1	Thessalon	Jan 5–6	24	NSHN
2	Thessalon	Jan 7–8	24	NSHN release
3	Thessalon	Jan 16–17	24	NSHN
4	Thessalon	Jan 25–27	48	SooToday
5	Thessalon	Jan 29–31	48	SooToday
6	Thessalon	Feb 10–11	24	SooToday
7	Thessalon	Feb 17–18	24	SooToday
8	Thessalon	Feb 20–21	24	CTV
9	Thessalon	Mar 11–14	72	SooToday
10	Thessalon	Mar 17–18	24	NSHN
11	Thessalon	Mar 19–21	48	NSHN
12	Thessalon	Mar 22–23	24	SooToday
13	Thessalon	Mar 27–30	72	SooToday
14	Thessalon	Apr 1–2	28	SooToday
–	Blind River	Apr 4 (morning)	not published	SooToday
15	Thessalon	Apr 7–9	48	SooToday
16	Thessalon	Apr 10–11	24	SooToday
17	Thessalon	Apr 13–14	24	SooToday
18	Richards Landing	Apr 30–May 1	24	SooToday
19	Thessalon	May 1–2	24	NSHN
20	Thessalon	May 4–6	48	SooToday
21	Richards Landing	May 5–6	24	NSHN release
22	Richards Landing	May 9–11	48	SooToday
23	Thessalon	July 2–3	38	NSHN
24	Richards Landing	Oct 9–10	24	SooToday

Source: North Shore Health Network announcements, January 2 to October 21, 2026, compiled by The Algoma News. Hours are announced closure windows.