Reopened Carberry ER solid win for Kinew, NDP

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/05/2024 (691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“It’s the first major step in a positive direction.”

— Carberry Health Action Committee member Loretta Oliver

Just a few short months ago, the town of Carberry was in danger of joining the unhappy group of communities that were about to lose their emergency room services — or have already done so. As Carberry Mayor Ray Muirhead put it, the community was in a “panic mode.”

The Carberry Health Centre’s emergency room closed indefinitely on Sept. 1 of last year, just a month before the Manitoba general election, due to a lack of qualified staff. The facility was about to lose its last remaining doctor, and the future of the ER looked grim.

The mood in Carberry is certainly lighter this morning following news this week that the efforts of the community, the regional health authority and the provincial government in securing enough health-care staff to reopen the facility’s ER.

Premier Wab Kinew told the Sun in a Thursday phone interview that the Carberry North Cypress-Langford Health Action Committee, Prairie Mountain Health and the Manitoba government worked together to find three doctors to staff the facility on a rotating basis.

With a broad grin on his face during a press conference on Friday morning in Carberry, Kinew’s announcement was met with tremendous applause from a clearly relieved populace. And he shared that grin with Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, who noted that there is clearly still more work to do in the region.

For the moment, it’s fair to say that this government has earned the right to do a little victory dance. While yesterday’s announcement could not have been made without the grassroots efforts of the community, a win is a win.

Not only have they come through with part of their campaign promise to address rural health-care concerns in Manitoba — particularly in Carberry — they have done so in a long-held Progressive Conservative riding which they lost handily in the last election.

For a new NDP government, it must have felt good to hear those cheers in a true-blue Tory constituency like Agassiz.

Further still, it appears the current dearth in paramedic services in Carberry will be addressed within the next few months as well, as two new paramedics are slated to join the community by the end of July.

These are solid political wins for Kinew, but they also mean the world for people living in the region who will now have some stability when it comes to health-care services. It also means that some of the pressure will come off in the Brandon ER as well, with a working facility now operating again in Carberry.

The trick, of course, is to accomplish more than the resurrection of just one emergency room in western Manitoba because there are several other communities that find themselves in need. We’d like to believe that Kinew meant what he said when he told Carberry residents that the lessons the government learned in helping Carberry will “help us across Prairie Mountain,” and “help us across Westman, Central Plains and all of Manitoba.”

Without doubt, that’s a tall order.

And with this small victory, many other communities will be looking for the province to help them with their own health-care successes. It’s safe to say that they will need to step forward in a big way to aid the government in making that happen, as Kinew strongly praised Carberry for doing.

Only time will tell if this government is successful in attracting the “400 more doctors, 300 more nurses, 200 paramedics and 100 home care workers” they promised last February.

But Loretta Oliver was right — this is a good first step.

» Matt Goerzen, editor