Manitoba’s NDP government has ordered Shared Health to cut administrative costs, saying it intends to redirect that money to the front lines of health care in the province — but the head of the Manitoba Nurses Union says the sting will impact the front lines and, ultimately, patient care.
“This is really very disheartening news, just before the new year,” union president Darlene Jackson said Tuesday.
Jackson said she’s already getting messages from nurses who say their regional health authorities are no longer covering sick shifts and are limiting overtime shifts in order to save the money.
“Nurses are saying, ‘We’re just going to work short, that’s just how it is,'” she said. “They’re going to be working with higher nurse-patient equivalents than they are now.
“When you cut funds, you cut essential services, which means … more patients per nurse [and] less patient care.”
Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said Shared Health — the organization that oversees the delivery of health care in the province — has been instructed to redirect eight per cent of its funding from its bureaucracy to the front lines and clinical services.
Regional health authorities were made aware of the governments’s directive in September, according to a government official.
It’s a “very achievable” target, Asagwara said.
“The ballooning bureaucracy in health care needs to be redirected to the front lines, to make sure that we have more staff and that patients have better care,” they said during a Tuesday news conference.
Shared Health is spending $68 million on corporate services, “and when you dig into those numbers, you begin to see very quickly … those corporate titles have no impact, no direct relationship to the care people are receiving at the bedside,” said Asagwara.
“To me that’s not an acceptable approach. We should be prioritizing hiring more nurses, more doctors, more health-care aides and allied health-care professionals, and directing regional health authorities and health leadership to take that approach has allowed us to see success in all those areas.”
Asagwara also said health-care leaders must be “accountable to making sure that we are staffing the health-care system.”
‘Right to the bone’: MNU
But the MNU’s Jackson said the province’s directive is reminiscent of Brian Pallister’s Progressive Conservative government ordering a 15 per cent cut to management in 2017.
“Health care is so lean, we’re right to the bone as it is. I don’t know how they’re going to possibly [do this],” she said.
“[Nurses are saying] we can’t give anymore. We’ve already done enough. If anything, our resources need to be bolstered.”
Jackson said she’s been told that health authorities have been directed to look for savings “in the $50-million ballpark.”
The province’s health-care system is currently staffed with a baseline level of nurses, and relies on overtime and private agency nurses to function, she said.
“That’s how we’re keeping our heads above water right now. So if we’re going to pull back on the overtime, that certainly is going to have an impact on patient care.”
Fixing health care was a major focus of the NDP’s election campaign in 2023, so the cuts are a disappointment, Jackson said.
More than a year later, “80 per cent of nurses are saying they have seen no improvement at all in our health-care system,” she said.
“We have seen announcements that they’re opening beds, [but] the comment I hear from nurses all the time is, ‘how are they going to staff those beds? We can’t staff the beds we have now.'”
The idea of spending less on administration, and more on nurses and doctors, sounds good, Jackson said, “but in my heart I don’t think that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
“I can tell you that management nurses are worried about their ability to provide safe, quality patient care once this rolls out.”
PC health critic Kathleen Cook echoed those comments, also characterizing the NDP’s redistribution of funds as a cut.
“If it walks like a cut and it talks like a cut, I think it’s a cut,” she said. “It’s certainly not what the NDP campaigned on and I very much doubt that during their listening tour … this is the advice that they got from front-line workers.”
The NDP made billions of dollars worth of election promises, and Cook says it appears as though the party is now trying to find ways to pay for those.
“I’m just surprised that they’ve decided to find the funding for those out of the health-care budget,” she said.
“It’s a very surprising and concerning decision … in a time when Manitobans are facing increasing wait times in our emergency rooms at the Grace and St. Boniface hospitals, increased wait times for diagnostic tests and surgeries.”