It feels like nothing has changed in health care since the NDP was elected to government nearly six months ago.
Wait times for most surgical and diagnostic procedures continue to rise. Hospital congestion, including emergency room wait times, is still getting worse. It appears no progress has been made on solving the severe shortage of doctors, nurses and allied health-care workers.
To be fair, the NDP has only had its hands on the levers of power for just over five months — hardly enough time to make significant inroads on anything in government, much less in health care. It takes months, sometimes years, for new investments and policy changes to wind through the system.
What is concerning, though, is there doesn’t seem to be a different approach to running health care than what existed prior to the Oct. 3 election.
Government “spokespeople” give the same tired answers to the same problems that have plagued the health system for years. There have been no structural changes made to the multiple layers of bureaucracy that run hospitals, care homes and home care.
Wait times for MRIs continue to rise, so much so that the Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists-Manitoba sounded the alarm bell Wednesday over growing delays for the scans.
“Manitobans are waiting longer for MRIs, and chronic under-investments in health human resource planning is a big reason,” said Dayna McTaggart, the group’s provincial manager.
Few would expect miracles from the NDP after less than six months in office. However, Premier Wab Kinew’s pledge to hire more health-care workers to chip away at those wait times doesn’t seem to be materializing. Both McTaggart’s group and the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals said this week the government is not even posting the jobs to fill vacancies for MRI technologists.
The government’s response is the same as it has been for years: an email statement from Shared Health, the faceless bureaucratic agency created by the former Tory government.
“We appreciate that waiting for diagnostic tests can be a stressful experience, which is why work is underway to increase diagnostic capacity and lower wait times across the province,” a nameless Shared Health spokesperson wrote in an email this week.
The median wait time for an MRI in Manitoba was 20 weeks in 2023, up from 14 weeks in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. It remained at 20 weeks in January, the most recent available data from the province on wait times. (The wait-time reporting lag of two to three months, sometimes longer, also hasn’t changed under the new government).
Emergency room wait times have also grown under the NDP. Not much has changed in how government is responding to that, either. The NDP is peddling the same misinformation as the previous Tory government about how opening “minor injury clinics,” like the one Kinew and Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara unveiled in Brandon this week, will reduce ER wait times.
Emergency department wait times are rising mainly because of a chronic shortage of staffed hospital beds on medical wards, not a lack of alternative care for low-acuity patients. That has been confirmed ad nauseam by emergency room physicians and the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.
Despite that evidence, governments — including the NDP — continue to spread the falsehood that redirecting low-acuity patients from ERs to clinics will have a material impact on wait times. It never has before and there is no reason to believe it will in the future.
Minor injury clinics do nothing to reduce the number of admitted, high-acuity patients languishing in ERs waiting days for a medical bed, which is the main wait-time driver.
That was reiterated — again — in a comprehensive report released this week by the association of emergency physicians titled “EM: Power – the Future of Emergency Care.”
“Research shows that the unbridled demand facing (emergency departments) is not from too many non-urgent patients, but because of poor access to primary and specialty care, a rising burden of unmanaged chronic disease and — most importantly — a lack of hospital beds for admitted patients,” the 328-page report says.
Until the NDP starts doing things differently than previous governments, it’s unlikely much, if anything, will change in health care.
tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca
Tom Brodbeck
Columnist
Tom has been covering Manitoba politics since the early 1990s and joined the Winnipeg Free Press news team in 2019.