Wab Kinew says a NDP government would give surgeons at a northeast Winnipeg hospital the license to perform more complex hip and knee surgeries.

If elected on Oct. 3, Kinew announced his government would build six step-down units within six months to bolster surgical capacity at Concordia Hospital. These beds would be set aside for patients requiring care after their procedure, where they'd benefit from a one nurse to one patient staffing ratio.

It's part of a pledge to turn Concordia into a centre for excellence for joint surgeries. The NDP leader said surgeons have been hamstrung from completing complex procedures since the hospital's ER closed in 2019, resulting in the loss of the medical support that allowed for closer monitoring of some patients.

The NDP's new commitment would change that, Kinew said Thursday, across the street from the hospital.

"We would take the shackles off the surgeons who work here, some of the best in the country, who right now are being prevented by the PC government from living up and delivering to their full scope of ability."

The current Progressive Conservative government has been moving to increase the number of hip and knee surgeries completed at the hospital.

A new operating room — the fifth at Concordia — opened in June. It has the capacity to increase the number of same-day and in-patient hip and knee replacements by an additional 1,000 procedures. The hospital completed more than 1,900 of those operations last year.

Kinew said that expansion doesn't make up for what's been lost.

"What the PCs have never addressed is the fact that when they close the ER here, they took away a nationally-renowned surgical team's ability to do more types of joint surgeries and more complex joint surgeries," he said.

In a statement on Thursday, PC MLA Shannon Martin called out the NDP for voting against recent PC budgets, which included funding for a fifth operating room.

The NDP has since announced it will adopt the fiscal plan outlined in the government's last budget, if elected.

The province's wait time dashboard shows a year-over-year increase in the number of people waiting for some of these surgeries.

In 2022, the average number of patients waiting for a knee replacement surgery was 2,346 patients, while just over 1,000 patients were on average waiting for a hip replacement. That compares with about 2,071 patients waiting for knee replacements and about 973 waiting for hip replacements in 2021.

On Monday, Kinew repeated his party's pledge to reopen the emergency department at Concordia once the necessary staff is in place, along with new ERs at Victoria and Seven Oaks in Winnipeg and in Eriksdale, Man. The NDP has given itself two years to hire an additional 300 nurses within Winnipeg.

Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont decried the NDP for making promises that could take years to realize. Reopening four emergency departments may take two terms in government, Kinew previously said.

"If you're hoping to get seen in any one of these imaginary ERs the NDP is promising to reopen, get ready for a record wait time — seven years," Lamont said.