Data exposes Asagwara’s failure

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/02/2025 (412 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While our NDP government and its health minister, Uzoma Asagwara, continue to tell Manitobans that progress is being made on its promise to fix Manitoba’s ailing health-care system, new data suggests that the situation is actually worsening across the province.

A report released yesterday by the Manitoba Nurses Union, entitled “Healthcare in Manitoba is in Crisis,” says that “In 2024, we had hoped to see improvements in several of the metrics we monitor—both in terms of nursing conditions and the healthcare system as a whole. Unfortunately, no measurable progress has been observed.”

Those are damning words, delivered straight from the front lines of our health-care system, and they are based on hard data.

The report reveals that over the past five years, the time it takes for patients to see a doctor or nurse practitioner in Winnipeg’s emergency department and urgent care facilities has nearly tripled — this despite the fact that the number of patient visits to those facilities has not significantly increased during that time period.

That is alarming, but the report also discloses that the rate of patients leaving Winnipeg’s ED and UC facilities without being seen has also nearly tripled over the past four years, to an average of slightly more than 15 per cent of patients. Even worse, the number of ED/UC visits at some hospitals have declined, yet the number of patients leaving without being seen has increased significantly.

It is tempting to dismiss this as a Winnipeg problem that has nothing to do with Brandon, but the report says that annual visit data for the Brandon Regional Health Centre emergency department — Manitoba’s largest ED facility outside of Winnipeg — is not publicly available. It says that the MNU has been forced to submit a FIPPA request for ED/UC visit numbers and “leaving without being seen” rates for that facility.

Worse still, the report also reveals that according to data obtained and analyzed by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Manitoba hospitals perform significantly worse than their national counterparts on “Hospital Standardized Mortality Ratio.” In fact, CIHI found that four of Manitoba’s largest hospitals rank among the eight worst performers in Canada, and that the Health Sciences Centre has the worst HSMR score in the nation.

The Brandon Regional Health Centre ranks eighth-worst on that list.

This latest MNU report follows its release of a report last month, which revealed that 42 per cent of its members gave the province a “D” (no improvement) in health-care delivery, while another 23 per cent said the situation has worsened. That adds up to 65 per cent of nurses saying that health care has either not improved or has gotten worse under the current government, with another 24 per cent saying there has only been “very minimal improvement.”

Those findings are consistent with those contained in a recent report by the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, which revealed that 48 per cent of its members said that their workplace lost staff last year and 62 per cent said their workload worsened in 2024. A staggering 59 per cent said morale has worsened in their workplace.

In addition to all of those findings, other data reveals that wait times for hip and knee replacement surgery were higher in 2024 than in 2023, as were the wait times for ultrasounds, MRIs and CT scans.

In response to all of that damning data, Asagwara continues to cling to the claim that Manitoba’s health-care system has improved since the NDP assumed power 16 months ago. If that was true, the nurses and other health care professionals working on the front lines of our health-care system would be saying so.

In fact, they are saying the opposite, and that forces Manitobans to decide who they believe – the nurses and other professionals who care for patients each day, or the minister who has shown a tendency to engage in deflection, buck-passing and scapegoating when cornered by the poor performance of our health-care system.

If this was some other government ministry, there would be room for patience, but this is our health-care system. Manitobans’ lives are on the line, and there is every likelihood many of them are being exposed to unnecessary risk and avoidable pain because of our broken system. They cannot afford to be patient while the government and minister continue to struggle to come to grips with the many problems within the system.

In fact, Manitobans have already been more than patient. The NDP were elected on a promise to fix the health-care system, but the situation has worsened under Asagwara’s leadership. Enough is enough. Perhaps the solution is a new health minister who can actually deliver the results Manitobans were promised.