Winnipeg ER, urgent care wait times swell to highest point in at least the past decade

Wait times at Winnipeg emergency rooms and urgent care centres are the worst they've been in close to a decade, numbers from the local health authority suggest.

The monthly median wait time for care at Winnipeg ERs and urgent care centres hit a peak of nearly 3½ hours as of September this year, according to data posted on the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority's website.

The 3.43-hour median wait compares to just over two hours in April 2014 — the earliest point in that data — a jump of about 70 per cent.

We didn't get here overnight," said Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara. "It's been years of of harm that was done to our health-care system and it's going to take us some time in order to move things in a better direction." 

Asagwara added listening is a key part of moving forward, adding that health-care workers have spent years bringing solutions forward, but they haven't had "a receptive government willing to respect their ideas and work with them and supporting them to take appropriate action."

"I know that Manitobans across the board deeply value health-care workers," said Asagwara. We have been calling them heroes for good reason and it's so important that we have patience and that we work together and support health-care workers through this time so that we can move health care in the right direction."

A median is a form of average that in this case indicates half of patients had shorter waits and half had longer waits.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority says wait times represent the time between a patient being registered when they arrived and when they saw a doctor or nurse practitioner.

The latest health region data comes two weeks after Shared Health, the provincial agency that co-ordinates health-care service delivery in Manitoba, provided data showing more than a third of patients who recently sought medical care at the Health Sciences Centre emergency room left without seeing a doctor amid growing wait times.

Premier Wab Kinew and the New Democrats were elected Oct. 3 after running a provincial election campaign focused on improving issues in the health-care system.

One of the party's main commitments was to reopen three emergency rooms shuttered by the Progressive Conservative government under former premier Brian Pallister as part of a broad health-care system overhaul.

The PCs were elected in spring 2016, at which point the median wait time still hovered around two hours, according to the WRHA data.

They dropped to around 1½ hours by late 2017, at which point the PC government began closing emergency rooms. In October 2017, the Victoria Hospital ER was converted into an urgent care centre, followed by ER conversions at Seven Oaks and Concordia hospitals. The urgent care centre at Misericordia was turned into an intravenous therapy clinic.

Median wait times plunged during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but have been climbing since 2021, the health authority data shows.

Calling the closure of three Winnipeg ERs "the single biggest mistake in health care that the PCs made," Kinew promised during the election campaign to spend $500 million over four years to address health-care recruitment in Manitoba, and then begin reopening the emergency rooms.

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