Wait forces couple to pay for MRI in Calgary

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This article was published 14/06/2023 (892 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Killarney man said he finally had enough, waiting to get a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test for his wife, so they made the trip to Alberta and paid out of pocket for the procedure at a private clinic.

Bernie Turner is 54 years old, and when he and his 55-year-old wife Margaret were on vacation in the U.S., she fell, injuring her knee. Once back home in early February, her doctor ordered an MRI, and according to Turner, that’s when optimism turned to upset.

There are two MRI scanners in the Prairie Mountain Health (PMH) region — one is in Brandon and the other in Dauphin.

The couple was told the wait for an MRI in Brandon was 17 weeks, which Turner calculated to mid-June. But he said they received a letter from PMH in May, with a new date for August, which meant the wait was 25 weeks.

“I finally said enough is enough, and I started making phone calls to several other places in Manitoba,” said Turner.

While searching for options for his wife, Turner said he called Boundary Trails Health Centre in Winkler, which he said had a 42-week waiting list, the Pan Am Clinic in Winnipeg, listing a six-month wait, and North Dakota, which has a portable MRI that goes to the small community of Rolla every second Wednesday, which he could have booked for US$2,034, but didn’t.

A government-run clinic in Saskatoon had a two-month wait, Turner said, so he called a private clinic in Regina.

“Regina said they were three weeks out, but if I was willing to go to their Calgary location, it was cheaper, and they had a shorter list. So, the Calgary location got her in 12 days later for $730,” said Turner.

“I’ve always resisted trying to go to the private system because I believe it creates a two-tier system for the haves and the have nots, but you must advocate for your family and yourself,” Turner said.

In March, the Winnipeg Free Press reported that wait times for MRIs had reached a two-year high in the province.

Data from the province’s diagnostic and surgical recovery task force showed waits jumped by 70 per cent from August 2022 and are the longest on record since March 2021, when waits were 26 weeks.

There were 20,149 Manitobans waiting for the test as of December 2022, which represented a backlog of 3,753 cases compared to wait lists before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The root cause of the long wait times is a staffing crisis in public health, made worse by a contract that is over five, and in some cases, six years old and frozen wages, said Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals (MAHCP), which represents 6,500 health-care professionals, technicians and paramedics.

The union and the Manitoba government have been in negotiations since March of last year, and in mediation since May.

Wages that are more than five years behind where they should be and current contract negotiations are a deterrent for attracting new MRI technicians to the province, said Linklater.

“It absolutely affects the ability to recruit and retain MRI technologists. Without a new competitive contract, and frozen wages for over five years, technologists just aren’t coming here and staying here,” said Linklater.

The province has the funds to pay people what they are worth, said Manitoba Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont, who added that when the province is exporting patients to Alberta, it’s exporting money there as well.

“This year alone, the government of Manitoba received over $1 billion more in transfer payments from the federal government,” he said. “That’s up by 16.8 per cent, and that’s up by over 100 per cent over the last seven years. The idea that we can’t afford this, is simply not true.”

There has been an increase in patients with urgent concerns, which has meant less capacity for elective MRIs, meaning those with less serious concerns wait longer, a spokesperson for Shared Health said in an email to the Sun.

In the past few years, MRI capacity has increased by more than 40 per cent, with about 7,900 exams performed each month, which is up from about 5,600 exams per month prior to the pandemic.

“The wait time for 90th percentile for elective MRIs in May was 15 weeks in Brandon and 18 weeks in Dauphin. This is down significantly from December, when the wait times were 34 and 26 weeks respectively,” said the statement.

The MRI test for Margaret Turner showed she requires a partial knee replacement, Bernie said.

“So now we wait, but we’re ahead of the game. The actual surgery might happen during the week we were scheduled to have the MRI in the first place.”

» mmcdougall@brandonsun.com

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