Warning signs blinking for health-care system

Rural Manitobans continue to see warning signs in our health-care system, in spite of efforts by the province to grow the numbers of physicians and nurses working in our province.

In an open letter obtained by CBC earlier this week, dozens of nurses at the Bethesda Regional Health Centre in Steinbach called out what they say are “excessive and unacceptable” longstanding safety risks that they argue are largely due to a lack of emergency room staff.

“We constantly fear for the safety of our patients and community,” the 40 ER nurses at the Steinbach hospital said in the letter, which was dated July 28.

The letter, which was sent to provincial politicians and officials by Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson, outlines how the lack of a second 24-7 triage nurse position in the city’s ER is causing long patient waits for initial assessments, and according to the CBC report, many hours more for reassessment of their conditions.

“We are not asking because we are tired of missing breaks and working overtime (though we are), we are asking because we have evidence to indicate we are daily at risk of witnessing an unnecessary tragedy in our waiting room,” the letter reads.

“It is common for the triage nurse to be responsible for up to 30 patients at a time. The risk that this poses to the lives of our patients cannot be understated.”

The problem has apparently been magnified by the fact that rural ERs like the one in Steinbach see patients from Winnipeg walking in the doors in an attempt to avoid long wait times in city ERs.

According to the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority website, which updates wait times at emergency departments throughout the city throughout the day, the wait time at the St. Boniface hospital was topping out at 13.75 hours, with Grace Hospital at 14 hours and the Health Sciences Centre 11.75 hours for adults and 3.75 hours for children as of mid-afternoon yesterday.

Meanwhile, a shortage of doctors in Brandon’s emergency department has caused lengthy wait times, and created a stressful atmosphere for nurses and other health-care professionals.

Jackson told the Sun this week that while the emergency department in Brandon is supposed to have two doctors on call, it happens “fairly often” that only one physician is actually on the floor.

“The fact that they only have one on in Brandon hospital is worrying because it is a very busy emergency department,” she said. “Not only just with the city of Brandon, but they have a fairly large catchment area.”

And of course, that results in longer wait times.

In May, Prairie Mountain Health CEO Treena Slate told the Sun that lengthy wait times at the Brandon Regional Health Centre were attributed to shortages of physicians and nurses.

In a letter sent to the Sun dated July 23, Brandon West Progressive Conservative MLA Wayne Balcaen alleged that the closure of the Dauphin hospital has been putting increased pressure on the Brandon ER.

“Patients experienced up to a 20-hour wait this past week,” Balcaen wrote. “According to my sources, triage acuity Level 2 patients in the ER should be treated within 15 minutes of presentation.”

He also noted that emergency physician vacancies are reportedly over 60 per cent, with “five or six more doctors looking to leave emergency medicine for other areas of practice,” and that there had been a “mass resignation” of BRHC hospitalists — medical doctors who care for patients exclusively inside the hospital — in July.

When the Sun followed up with Prairie Mountain Health to confirm the loss of physicians at the hospital, we were offered a message attributed to Slate that did not fully answer our questions.

“There have been some physician staffing changes over the past few months, including some decreases in hospitalist coverage areas at Brandon Regional Health Centre (BRHC),” Slate’s statement read. “Concurrently, with the support of physicians and clinical leadership, BRHC has improved patient admission and discharge protocols, improving patient flow, while BRHC is experiencing higher inpatient volumes related to the Dauphin Regional Health Centre flooding incident.”

It’s worth recalling the fact that in October 2025, the province was trumpeting the hiring of 164 doctors in the year previous, even as Doctors Manitoba was warning that a growing number of physicians in the province were expressing an interest in either retiring from the profession or moving out of province.

The NDP have promised since the 2023 election campaign that their government would be the one to fix health care. Sure, there are some positive signals coming out of the province’s recruitment efforts, but there are also some serious warning signs out of rural Manitoba of a health-care system on the verge of needing life support.