Helping Everyone Access Care 365 Days of the Year with holidayhours.ca

Every December, the same quiet crisis repeats across Canada. Clinics close for the holidays, pharmacy hours shift, and a parent with a feverish child at 7 p.m. on Boxing Day faces a choice between guessing which clinic might be open and defaulting to the emergency department. It's not a failure of any one clinic — it's a failure of information.

Why we built holidayhours.ca

Holidayhours.ca, powered by Empower Health, exists to close that information gap: quickly check the holiday hours of local clinics and pharmacies, so the question 'who's open right now?' has an answer that isn't a dozen phone calls to closed offices. It grew out of the same mission as iamsick.ca, our patient platform for finding local healthcare options where and when you need them — work that earned national news coverage, including a CityNews feature in December 2019, precisely because holiday access is a problem every Canadian family recognizes.

The note that says it best

Of everything we've built, one of the things we're proudest of is a note we received from a grateful mother who found care for her child during the holidays using the platform — we've shared her story (with permission) on our YouTube channel. Access to care isn't an abstraction; it's a specific parent, on a specific holiday evening, finding a specific open door.

365-day access is a system property

Statutory holidays are the stress test, but the underlying problem is year-round: care options exist, and people can't see them. That's why the same infrastructure powers all of it — directories that tell patients who's open and accepting, and EMR-integrated online booking that turns 'open' into 'booked' without a phone call. For clinics, publishing accurate holiday hours and keeping online booking live through the season isn't just a service to patients — it's how you capture the demand that would otherwise land on the ED, and how your community learns you're the practice that's reachable.

For patients: bookmark holidayhours.ca before the next long weekend. For clinics: if your holiday schedule lives on a piece of paper taped to the door, let's fix that.

Sources & further reading

• Holidayhours.ca — check holiday hours of local clinics & pharmacies
• iamsick.ca — find local healthcare options, powered by Empower Health
• A note Empower Health received from a grateful mother (video)
• CityNews — Empower Health news coverage (December 2019)