The good news for Manitoba’s NDP government is emergency room wait times continue to fall slightly, according to recently released hospital data. The bad news is wait times for hip replacement surgery have soared to new highs.
Fixing Manitoba’s beleaguered health-care system was by far the New Democratic Party’s biggest promise when voters went to the polls Oct. 3. The NDP promised to reduce hospital wait times by hiring more doctors, nurses and other front-line staff, reducing the size of the health-care bureaucracy and expanding hospital capacity.
The NDP government inherited record-high hospital wait times from the former Progressive Conservative government in several areas, including ER wait times, which peaked at four hours in December 2023. Since then, they’ve been coming down, albeit slowly.
The median wait time for ERs and urgent care centres in Winnipeg in May dropped to 3.52 hours, according to data released by the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority last week. The longest wait time for nine out of 10 ER and urgent care patients (referred to as the 90th percentile wait) peaked at almost 11 hours in December. That fell to 9.49 hours in May.
Even with the recent decline, the problem is especially bad at St. Boniface Hospital, where the median wait time in May was 5.25 hours. However, that number has come down from a peak of 5.9 hours in December.
The province still has a long way to go to get ER wait times back to where they were two years ago, when they hovered between two and 2.5 hours. But they are headed in the right direction.
What’s especially significant about the recent decline is it occurred during the winter months, when respiratory illnesses, including influenza and COVID-19, flood emergency departments with very sick patients and cause ER wait times to rise.
The time it takes to see a physician goes up when the number of admitted patients in emergency departments exceeds the availability of staffed hospital beds on medical wards. When that occurs, doctors and nurses have less time to treat newly arriving patients, which usually drives up overall wait times.
The province has hired some new front-line staff and made other changes, such as introducing weekend patient discharges to free up more medical beds sooner. It appears those improvements are helping to reduce ER wait times.
The numbers aren’t as encouraging in other areas of health care. The median wait time for hip replacement surgery in Manitoba increased to 34 weeks in April, according to the most recent data available. It’s the highest it’s been over the past four years. It peaked briefly at 34 weeks in August 2020 during the pandemic but fell to 21 weeks in October 2023.
The median wait time for knee replacement surgery is slightly better, at 31 weeks. But it’s grown after it fell to 24 weeks in December.
Median wait times are the point at which half of patients wait longer and half wait less. They do not include the time it takes to see a specialist.
One of the problems about measuring wait times for medical services is that outside of ER data, the province only publishes wait times in nine areas, including hip and knee surgery, cataract surgery (which has come down slightly in recent years) and cardiac surgery, which is largely unchanged from pre-pandemic levels.
Those nine categories include wait times for several diagnostic tests, some of which have increased. The median wait time for an elective MRI in April (21 weeks), for example, was slightly longer than it was for the same month last year. It’s also well above pre-pandemic levels, when it was around 14 weeks.
The median wait time for an elective CT scan has grown to eight weeks in recent months, well above the four-to-six-week level it was at for most of the past four years. It’s not great news for a government that ran on “fixing” health care.
Published wait times for the three other diagnostic tests — ultrasounds, bone density tests and myocardial perfusion scans — are close to where they were before the pandemic.
It’s still too soon to judge the NDP’s record on health care after less than nine months in government. Change doesn’t occur quickly in health care. Still, it’s important to keep track of the party’s record on its most significant election commitment.
tom.brodeck@freepress.mb.ca
Tom Brodbeck
Columnist
Tom Brodbeck is a columnist with the Free Press and has over 30 years experience in print media. He joined the Free Press in 2019. Born and raised in Montreal, Tom graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1993 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and commerce. Read more about Tom.
Tom provides commentary and analysis on political and related issues at the municipal, provincial and federal level. His columns are built on research and coverage of local events. The Free Press’s editing team reviews Tom’s columns before they are posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press’s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.
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