Critics pan Shared Health fix for paramedic shortage

A plan by Shared Health to provide free training for emergency medical responders — but not for paramedics — is being criticized by the Paramedic Association of Manitoba and the union representing 7,000 allied health workers.

To address the shortage of paramedics in Westman, Shared Health has offered 11 people full tuition scholarships for emergency medical responder (EMR) training for rural areas.

Once the 11 EMRs are trained, Shared Health said they would be offered positions within PMH and encouraged to progress through full paramedic training.

Paramedic association administrative director Rebecca Clifton said she wonders why the government is not offering Manitobans educational bursaries for paramedic training in the first place.

“Simply getting butts in seats is not an appropriate path forward when it comes to paramedic care,” Clifton said.

“Paying for EMR training is probably something the government sees as a quick and easy fix, but they would then be under-filling paramedic positions with EMRs and that would mean paramedic services are going backwards in rural Manitoba,” she said.

Paramedic training is roughly three times longer than EMR training. Paramedics perform emergency and non-emergency patient care, including assessing patients, performing CPR, administering medications and IVs and transporting patients to medical facilities.

EMRs work alongside trained paramedics, performing essential tasks such as patient assessment, trauma management and monitoring vital signs to support stabilization of individuals.

Clifton said her association would support sponsored paramedic training or educational bursaries for Manitobans who want to enter into a paramedic program.

“Communities not only need ambulances and paramedics available to respond in a timely manner, but they also deserve the appropriate level of care at the doorstep,” she said.

“There is not a single EMR on an ambulance in the City of Winnipeg, and we believe that rural Manitobans should have access to that same level of care provided by (paramedics).”

Another critic of Shared Health’s EMR training plan is Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, which represents 7,000 allied health workers.

Linklater said paying to train EMRs instead of paramedics will have a negative effect on service quality and won’t solve what he calls the paramedic crisis.

The vacancy rate for paramedics in the PMH region is 36 per cent, according to data supplied to the Sun by Shared Health, the province’s health authority.

“Vacancy rates in western Manitoba have been hovering around 40 per cent for years,” Linklater said.

“The truly frustrating aspect of all this is that Shared Health has not tried anything new to recruit or retain paramedics. Staffing has actually worsened, with a net loss of three paramedics so far in 2025,” he said.

“Meanwhile, Manitobans are still waiting an hour or more for an ambulance in a medical emergency, and there are routinely fewer than half of the ambulances on the road that there should be.”

Linklater was referring to a report the union received through a freedom of information request, originally released in February.

In 2024, rural ambulances were out of service, on average, almost 30,000 hours every month because of staffing shortages, which was a 400 per cent increase since 2020.

Call volumes increased 64 per cent since 2018 across the four rural health regions — PMH, Southern Health-Santé Sud, Northern and Interlake-Eastern.

In the PMH and Interlake-Eastern regions, most response times were more than 50 minutes, which is well above the under-30-minute target, according to the union.

“MAHCP has gone around Shared Health and proposed solutions directly to government, but we are still waiting for a formal response,” Linklater said.

Solutions Linklater said he proposed included covering the cost of tuition, fees and supplies for paramedics in return for service in rural communities, as well as covering cost of travel and accommodation for hard-to-fill positions and shifts.

The government needs to provide incentives to get paramedics practising in rural Manitoba, Progressive Conservative MLA Kathleen Cook told the Sun.

Cook, the PC health critic, cited an education cost recovery program for paramedic recruits being offered in Kenora, Ont. It provides up to $4,000 back per year for two years to help with tuition, fees, books and supplies.

“This is an NDP government that promised 90 new paramedics in their first year, and we’re now two years in and they aren’t even close to delivering on that number, and they don’t seem to have any plan or any urgency to get us there,” Cook said.

“And that’s despite the fact that there are a number of potential solutions that have been brought forward by front-line paramedics and other experts who have suggestions as to how we could increase the number of paramedics practising in rural Manitoba,” she said.

“Exacerbating that problem is Kenora offering an education cost recovery grant for new paramedicine grads, which is going to lose them to nearby Northwestern Ontario, rather than getting them hired here in Manitoba.”

The Sun reached out to Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara’s office for comment, but they did not respond to our request by press time.

Additional questions to Shared Health were not answered, including how many funded paramedic positions there are in the Prairie Mountain region, how many of those positions are filled and how many paramedics are currently on leave.

Clifton, who is a full-time paramedic, said not only is the shortage of staff the root cause of exhaustion and burnout, but there is a negative connotation when it comes to working in a rural area.

“New graduates have indicated that they are nervous taking a position with Shared Health in some of the far rural and remote areas as they don’t know if they will ever be able to make their way back to some of the more urban areas,” she said.

“Therefore they choose to apply to Winnipeg as it is a guaranteed location.”

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