Manitoba adding 36 acute-care beds at St. Boniface Hospital to reduce ER strain, wait times
Medical director says growing waits in ERs linked to inability to move patients
The provincial government will add 36 new acute-care beds to St. Boniface Hospital as a means of addressing mounting wait times in emergency rooms and other pressures on the health-care system.
The beds will open in phases beginning with 10 in late March and be used to help transition patients from the ER to other areas of care in the facility, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara announced during a news conference at the Winnipeg hospital Wednesday.
"Under the previous PC government, health care wasn't invested in, it was cut year over year ... and when those decisions were made it forced a number of health-care workers out of our health-care system," said Asagwara, who was a psychiatric nurse before being elected MLA for Union Station in 2019.
"Investing in health care in Manitoba isn't just about beds, it's about people, and so our commitment is to make sure that we're investing in people in our health-care system across the province and taking a system-wide approach which hasn't been done in many years."
They said the beds will open in a "sustainable" manner and the hope is to have all 36 operational and staffed within a year. Asked where the staff would come from, Asagwara suggested there are hundreds of nursing students eager to get jobs in the near future.
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The NDP was elected last fall after running a campaign focused on improving issues that ail the health-care system. They took over in October, when ER and urgent care wait times at Winnipeg hospitals swelled to their highest point in a decade.
In November, the newly minted government committed to adding 31 new acute-care beds to Winnipeg's Grace Hospital and putting up funds for hiring more staff to help hospitals discharge more patients seven days a week, up from five.
Asagwara said those pledges and the latest commitment of three dozen new beds are a product of listening to feedback from front-line workers.
Dr. Paul Ratana, the medical director for the emergency department at St. Boniface, said there are many days that all the beds in the St. Boniface ER are occupied by patients who have already been seen and require admission.
"But their movement to the wards cannot occur for hours, or in some cases days," he said.
"The inability for patients previously seen and admitted is, in my experience, the No. 1 reason that wait times are excessive … and it prevents patients from getting out of the waiting room and into treatment places."
WATCH | St. Boniface doctor hopeful new beds will get facility 'to a better place':
Adding more acute-care beds is a "vital" step toward reducing bottlenecks and freeing up space in ERs so more people can be treated sooner, Ratana said.
The Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, a union representing 7,000 allied health workers, said there aren't enough workers to staff existing beds.
MAHCP president Jason Linklater said the province needs to work on "filling vacancies and recruiting more respiratory therapists, X-ray and lab technologists, pharmacists and many other specialized health-care professionals necessary to expand capacity."
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said he, Asagwara and St. Boniface MLA Robert Loiselle would be back at the hospital at shift change Thursday morning to solicit more feedback from staff.
"Our government respects your expertise, we respect your experience, we respect how you've felt these past number of years, and now we are going to match your commitment at the government level," Kinew said, addressing front-line workers. "We're going to keep coming back and we're going to keep checking in."
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