Brandon Clinic closes walk-in services due to physician burnout and inadequate staffing: CEO

The Brandon Clinic will not offer walk-in services starting July 4 as its CEO says a shortage of physicians is leading to burnout and an inability to keep up with patients coming in from rural parts of the province. 

"They're working more hours in the hospital, so there's just less hours to go around," said Darcy Bell, CEO of the Brandon Clinic. 

The clinic gets numerous patients from rural communities where they don't have enough health-care services, Bell said.

"We just can't keep up with the amount of people that are coming in from everywhere." 

The Brandon Clinic provides a variety of services for all of the Westman region, including family health, mental health exams, immunizations and minor surgical procedures like biopsies and excisions. 

Bell says because of the services the clinic provides, they even see patients coming in from Saskatchewan. 

There are other walk-in clinics in Brandon, but with this closure, some people will choose to use hospital services instead, said Gina McKay, president of CUPE Manitoba, the union that represents health-care workers in the province. 

"Without a walk-in clinic ... it forces community members to access the emergency room," said McKay.

"We have a mismanagement of health care in the province and we know that no matter what, emergency lines get longer, staffing shifts get longer, and it's a huge impact on the workers but also the communities." 

For the Manitoba Health Coalition, an advocacy group in favour of public health care, the problems faced by the Brandon Clinic mirror those of the Manitoba Clinic, which earlier this year was at risk of financial collapse.

"When you look at these two iconic pieces of Manitoba's primary health-care system, we kind of got to look at them as too big to fail," said Thomas Linner, from the Manitoba Health Coalition.

He says health-care centres like the Brandon Clinic supplement the health care needs the public system is unable to fulfill. 

Losing physicians to other provinces 

According to Doctors Manitoba, the province has the lowest number of family physicians per capita in Canada, which according to Bell can be felt at the Brandon Clinic. 

"Unfortunately, Manitoba's winning that category. That's not something that you want to win in the country, but we are," said Bell. 

He says that the province is not doing enough to recruit and retain physicians. 

"There [are] so many more provinces that have greater recruitment efforts and packages put forward that we are at a loss," said Bell. "Manitoba has to step up its game." 

For CUPE, the loss of health-care services in rural Manitoba is seen as a direct result of provincial cuts. 

"We need a government that is committed to investing in public services," said McKay. 

The government has "talked about healing the health-care system, but what we're seeing is the opposite, we're seeing cuts, we're seeing closures." 

Earlier this month, the Brandon Clinic laid off seven health-care workers, including six nurses and a transcriptionist, due to funding constraints, it said at the time.

McKay said the workers at the clinic wanted to stay. 

CUPE "members are losing their positions, there's understaffing, there's longer shifts and there's demand on the health-care support workers in such great ways … and that leads to really heavy workloads," said McKay. 

"They want to stay. Support workers and health-care workers are in it. They're in it with their hearts."

Change to funding 

The Brandon Clinic is a privately run clinic and receives no direct money from Prairie Mountain Health or the province. 

The clinic receives its funding from cost sharing of physicians, and charging the provinces for the services it provides to patients.

"As the cost sharing pool of physicians shrinks, that's where you feel that pinch on your expenses," said Bell.

Changes to how the clinic is funded could help curb any further cuts, Linner said. 

"There are private clinics who bill almost entirely the provincial government for their services. So if we need to remove the middleman here, let's do that to ensure that patients have access to the … services that they need," said Linner, from the Manitoba Health Coalition. 

"We need for the government to make sure that there are options on the table, including the potential for taking over those clinics and bringing them into the public system in order to ensure that Manitoba patients and families are still able to access the primary care that they need."