Manitoba adds 68 transitional beds to free up emergency department space

Manitoba is adding dozens of beds in a hospital, a personal care home, a community health office and a shelter as part of the government's latest effort to free up space in overwhelmed emergency departments.

The province is opening 68 transitional beds, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said.

The beds will temporarily accommodate patients discharged from the emergency department, while they await a longer-term placement at a different health-care facility or their home.

While these types of beds are often reserved for seniors, including those waiting for admission to a personal care home, the government also intends to use them for other patients awaiting treatment, such as physiotherapy, and those who may otherwise be homeless if discharged.

Asagwara is confident the new beds will open up space for the high-acuity patients stuck waiting for a bed in emergency departments and, in turn, reduce their wait times.

"It's going to allow for people to leave hospital in a more timely way," Asagwara said in an interview.

Twenty-five of the beds will be at Holy Family Personal Care Home in Winnipeg to support seniors awaiting a spot at the personal care home of their choice.

The province is setting up 15 beds at Interlake-Eastern Health Services in Selkirk and eight at Winnipeg's Misericordia Health Centre for seniors and other patients receiving care.

The remaining 20 beds are being assigned to the 24/7 safe space run by St. Boniface Street Links. The facility is receiving patients who don't have housing readily available to them.

One patient arrived after a year-and-a-half in a hospital and another person after 486 days, St. Boniface Street Links executive director Marion Willis said.

"They have medical needs that could be met in the community, if only there was some place for them to go," she said, noting that would have enabled them to have been discharged earlier.

Around half of the 68 transitional beds are already in use, the government said.

Waits 'definitely' down in Selkirk

Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority CEO Marion Ellis said in Selkirk, the 15 transitional beds are already being used and the wait times in the emergency department have fallen.

Ellis said she recently got a "good news" phone call about something the city hadn't encountered on a weekend in years.

"There were no patients on emergency stretchers that were to be admitted onto in-patient beds, because anybody who needed to be admitted was already admitted." 

Patient flow remains a concern, Ellis said, but it shows progress when every stretcher in the emergency department is open and available. 

"I don't want us to take our foot off the pedal."

At a news conference Friday in Selkirk, Yvonne Oxer, project manager of the transitional care unit, said she expects they'll gradually be accepting more patients through these beds.

"I think it's going to have a real positive impact on not just Selkirk, but throughout the region because we will be accepting patients from other facilities," she said. 

The new transitional beds, which cost the provincial government $1.7 million in capital and $3.7 million in annual operating costs, are on top of the 151 new acute care beds funded in this year's provincial budget. Those new beds, some of which haven't opened yet, include 50 at the Health Sciences Centre, 36 at St. Boniface Hospital and 31 at Grace Hospital, all in Winnipeg.

Although the new beds are supposed to reduce wait times, patients in those hospitals are experiencing longer waits on average than a year ago.

The median wait time for emergency and acute care centres in Winnipeg increased to 3.6 hours in June from 3.52 hours in May. It's a jump from 2.87 hours in June 2023.

Asagwara continued to blame the former Progressive Conservative government for closing emergency departments and cutting some hospital beds, despite the NDP being elected 10 months ago.

The long waits for care is a problem that didn't start overnight, the minister said.

"The larger improvements that we all want to see is going to take more time, but we're taking steps in the right direction each and every day," Asagwara said.

"We are seeing improvements around vacancy rates, as one example. We're seeing improvements in terms of people having options and accessing care."

Dr. Lauren Lapointe-Shaw, a general internist physician and health services researcher at University of Toronto, said there's minimal research into the long-term impacts of transitional beds, but she said anecdotally in Ontario "we did witness some degree of an emptying out of our long-stay patients who are in these alternate level of care beds as they filled up those transitional beds.

"However, since that time, now sometimes we have to wait for the transitional beds as well," she added, though she explained the waits are often short. 

Lapointe-Shaw questions if there are enough long-term care beds and home-care staff to accommodate the patients after they're discharged from a transitional bed.

Opening more of these beds "may help in terms of freeing up hospital beds, but in some ways it's likely to be temporary, as the volumes of older adults with … more health complexities, we know continue to rise over time," Lapointe-Shaw said.

The province says the remaining 33 transitional beds that haven't opened yet should be operational by the end of the year.