Manitoba hires hundreds of health-care workers, on track to meet target: Kinew
Santiago Arias Orozco | CBC News | Posted: September 26, 2024 9:50 PM | Last Updated: September 26
NDP celebrates addition of 873 new staff across a wider range of positions after promising to add 1,000
Staff vacancy levels in Manitoba's health-care system are starting to stabilize, Premier Wab Kinew says, as the province fills hundreds of positions, bringing Manitoba closer toward its goal of hiring 1,000 health-care workers.
Last spring, the NDP government pledged $310 million from its budget toward its goal of hiring 1,000 health-care workers after subtracting the number of staff who've left.
Halfway through the year, the province said it had staffed 873 net new positions, which includes 304 nurses, 290 health-care aides and 116 physicians to Manitoba's public health-care system.
"While we haven't hit our goal of completely fixing health care, the early steps that we're taking are showing results," Kinew said at a news conference Thursday.
"We're keeping our word to you … but there's still a lot more work to be done."
The province had initially set its target to fill 1,000 positions with 100 doctors, 210 nurses, 90 paramedics and 600 care aides.
But the province is now counting positions across other health-care disciplines that were not part of the initial target, including hiring seven midwives, 61 physician residents and 80 allied health workers in diagnostic positions.
"Any increase in those numbers is is worth counting ... the issue is that we're going to need many more," Kathleen Cook, the Progressive Conservatives' health critic, said in an interview Thursday.
"You've got Manitobans who still can't access a family doctor, wait times for surgeries and diagnostic tests are still too high, and we've got rural ER closures happening all over the province," she said.
"There's a lot more work to do."
Hiring efforts across the board: province
Minister of Health Uzoma Asagwara said the province left "no stone unturned" to hire new health-care workers, including setting up a recruitment and retention office to bring internationally educated workers into the province.
Asagwara added Manitoba has contacted over 250 health-care workers out of the province, including campaigning in the U.K. to attract physicians.
Asagwara said the province has also taken steps to bring recently retired nurses back to the workforce, which has resulted in 60 of them rejoining the health-care system since January.
"We saw that the health-care workforce numbers were dwindling … we saw a toxic culture under the previous government that resulted in mass resignations, early retirements, and quite frankly, paltry recruitment and retention numbers," Asagwara said.
"We committed to turning that tide."
Kinew gave the province's health minister a lot of the credit for the new hires.
"Under Heather Stefanson, people would graduate and leave the province," he said. "Under Minister Asagwara, somebody who graduates gets an offer letter put in their hand to work right here in Manitoba."
But Cook said Thursday's net hiring numbers are due to "many recruitment and retention initiatives" put forward by the previous government.
Cook said it is "disingenuous" for the NDP government to take "full credit" when the previous government added more seats at the University of Manitoba's medical school and oversaw the creation of a nurse pool.
"These are seeds that are planted that don't bear fruit immediately, they take time, and today's announcement is a result of that forethought and that planning," she said.
'A slap in the face': operating room attendant
Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Healthcare Professionals, told CBC News the union isn't seeing an increase in the number of allied health professionals they were hoping for.
"We can see that only seven new paramedics out of 90 they committed to hire ... that is not enough to get an ambulance there faster when Manitobans need it," he said.
Vacancies in urban centres are not being posted as positions remain unfilled, Linklater said, adding while it might be in an effort to drive applicants to more remote and northern communities, the demand for jobs also exists in cities.
"It is a chronic problem that we've seen with paramedics in lab and diagnostic imaging, and it's something that we want to see change," he said.
Meanwhile, Tracy Drexler, an operating room attendant, said the province's announcement came as "a slap in the face" in the backdrop of a potential strike that could see 25,000 support workers hit the picket lines beginning Oct. 8.
"You told us you were going to fix health care [but] you can't fix health care if you don't have staff and you're not going to be able to retain the staff if you're not going to pay us a fair wage," Drexler said.
CUPE, one of the two unions representing support workers preparing to strike, said recruitment and retention of their positions should be a priority for government. The union said now is the time for tangible improvements.
"The staffing crisis in health care, we are at a breaking point more so than even during COVID," Shannon McAteer health-care coordinator for CUPE Manitoba told CBC News.
"If the desired outcome from the government was to try and calm the waters, I believe it's had the opposite effect."
No relief yet: Nurses Union
A spokesperson for the Manitoba Nurses Union said in a statement the net hiring of 340 new nurses is significant, but members on the front lines have "yet to report any noticeable relief," such as a drastic reduction in mandatory overtime and "wasteful" agency spending.
Doctors Manitoba said a net increase in the number of physicians hired is a step in the right direction toward addressing staff shortages.
A spokesperson for the union added the number of physicians currently working might shrink once the licences of existing doctors expire later in the fall with some opting out.
But Kinew is confident the province is going to reach its hiring target in the coming months, and said increasing staff numbers is only a first step.
"It is going to take us many years of sustaining this kind of effort for us to deliver the improvements to health care that we want to see for patients right across this great province," he said.