No easy fix for staffing shortage

“Had the previous government focused on building capacity instead of cutting it, Brandon would be in a much better position.”

— Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, November 2024

In late 2024, the staffing situation at Brandon’s emergency department was so dire that doctors at the hospital took the drastic step of pleading for help from Manitoba’s health minister.

They penned a letter outlining an emergency room with a “dire staffing crisis” that had put the operation “on the brink of collapse.”

As our sister paper, the Winnipeg Free Press, reported at the time, the letter outlined a litany of problems that included the loss of experienced nurses, extreme burnout and a high number of patients under the influence of meth who required a lot of resources.

“In our current conditions, we WILL experience a catastrophic outcome that could have been prevented … We are asking that you please hear our pleas for help, for the safety of our staff, patients, and community,” stated the letter from staff at the Brandon Regional Health Centre.

Experienced nurses were resigning due to the unsafe staffing levels, and the constant mandating of overtime shifts. And there was a 34 per cent vacancy rate for emergency physicians, which rose to 42 per cent in January of last year when two doctors were preparing to take maternity leave.

The letter also said that ER shifts were increasingly staffed with just one physician, and that it was not uncommon for multiple patients in critical condition to arrive simultaneously during the busiest hours.

“It is not sustainable,” the letter read. “It is not safe.”

Not surprisingly, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew and Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara both placed the blame for staffing shortages on the former Progressive Conservative governments, saying Tory cuts to health care had hurt the province.

In spite of efforts to address these issues by increasing nursing and doctor education resources, and making efforts to hire more physicians and staff, things did not improve much last year at the province’s second-largest emergency room.

In August, Prairie Mountain Health was left scrambling to fill 10 vacant ER shifts. An email obtained by the Sun marked “URGENT Request” asked its physicians to cover four days at the Brandon ER. While all shifts had been filled shortly thereafter, the situation worried Doctors Manitoba.

“While we appreciate the last ditch urgent scrambling to cover the numerous vacant shifts, we are concerned about the overall sustainability of ER physician coverage in Brandon and the serious impact to patient wait times when this busy ER is down to single physician coverage on a repeated basis,” a Doctors Manitoba spokesperson said at the time.

Fast forward to December, where the ER at the Brandon hospital was down to a single doctor for a total of 185 hours over the holidays.

The Sun obtained a copy of a memorandum that was emailed to staff, including rural ER physicians on Dec. 19, that said the ER “continues to experience significant physician shortages, that will likely continue for the foreseeable future.” Between Dec. 19 and Dec. 31, there were several periods when only one doctor was on shift, including from 3:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve to 3:30 p.m. on Christmas Day, and from midnight on Dec. 25 to 7:30 a.m. on Dec. 27.

This paper also recounted the experience of 75-year-old Bev Storie, who waited seven hours in Brandon’s ER with a likely bladder infection in December before being assessed by a doctor.

The nurse who took her to a patient bed and the doctor who saw her were both understandably apologetic — yet it must be said that this situation is not their fault.

And Storie noted how “kind and caring” all the health-care staff were, even though the nurse who looked after her was working a double shift due to a nurse shortage.

As we have previously reported, BRHC’s emergency department should have six physician shifts per day, designed to ensure double physician coverage on a 24-7 basis. But there obviously remain significant gaps in the staffing at Brandon’s hospital — and the situation over the Christmas holidays proves it.

And it is now 2026 — only a little more than a year away from the official date of another provincial election. The NDP and the RHA have had more than two years to address the shortages here in Brandon since the 2023 election.

As we have documented many times in this space, no government — PC or NDP — seems to have the magic bullet solution for fixing health care in Brandon, let alone our province. As the BRHC letter from 2024 says, this situation is not sustainable in the long term.

We remain hopeful that the Kinew government continues to work at improving staffing levels at the Brandon hospital, in conjunction with Prairie Mountain Health, for the benefit of patient care.

And we must also fairly acknowledge that wait times at other major hospitals in Winnipeg currently sit at 14.75 hours at St. Boniface Hospital, and 11.75 hours at the Health Sciences Centre and Grace Hospital. By comparison, seven hours seems preferable.

But the staffing issues at BRHC persist, and it’s time that the NDP simply acknowledge that there is no easy fix for what has been a chronic, long-standing staffing shortage in western Manitoba.