Lack of nurses pushes Altona's emergency room to close until the fall

A southern Manitoba town of 4,200 people is losing its hospital's emergency room for several months at least.

The temporary closure of Altona's emergency department is attributed to a lack of available nurses, a Southern Health official said.

The emergency department will close from April 1 until likely the fall, once the health authority expects to shore up staffing levels.

"Obviously, this isn't what we wanted," Noreen Shirtliff, Southern Health's regional lead for acute care and chief nursing officer, said.

"We're saddened that we have to go this route, but we need to and we're going to work really hard over this next period of time to stabilize that nursing workforce and get things back up to the level we would like them."

In the meantime, emergency care will be offered at Boundary Trails Health Centre in Morden/Winkler and the Morris General Hospital, around 40 kilometres away.

Hospital turns into an urgent care centre

Altona's hospital will still deal with non-emergency matters, including urgent care. The hospital will also handle some outpatient services usually the domain of the emergency department, such as lab work, minor procedures and wound care, states a letter from Southern Health to the community.

Shirtliff said several challenges have hampered staffing levels, including people who are temporarily on leave and nurses working at COVID-19 testing sites or other areas of the pandemic response, Shirtliff said.

The Altona Community Memorial Health Centre has dealt with staffing issues for a few years, though the problem has been exacerbated in the last six months, she said. The hospital has required overtime from its staff and hired more agency nurses, but she said those options aren't sustainable.

Shirtliff said she's confident a mix of returning staff and recruitment efforts will allow the emergency room to reopen. 

Altona Mayor Al Friesen said rumblings of staffing woes have spread in his town, south of Winnipeg, for the last year. The ER has periodically closed some days as a result.

He's been assured the emergency room will reopen by the fall. 

"Even though we seldom have need of an ER on an individual basis, I think for a community it's an insurance, it's a sense of comfort knowing that it's there when and if we need it," Friesen said.

Without the emergency department, Friesen's been told the hospital can care for 80 per cent of its usual patients.

NDP health critic Uzoma Asagwara brought up the temporary closure during question period on Thursday. They spoke of Tim Friesen, a man in palliative care who wrote a letter to the government last fall, weeks before his death, saying the closure of any ER in the Pembina Valley, even temporarily, was "nearly ludicrous."

Asagwara called on the province to "heed his words" and fix the staffing shortfall. 

In response, health minister Heather Stefanson said the retention and recruitment of health-care professionals is a long-standing problem in rural communities. She then read quotes from previous NDP health ministers who said as much.