Empty beds due to staffing shortage

After almost four years of construction activity, the new critical care facility at the Brandon Regional Health Centre is expected to begin receiving patients next month. The number of beds in the new Intensive Care Unit will increase from 10 to 12, and eventually grow to 16 beds depending on the number of nurses interested in working in the unit. The 30-bed Internal Medicine Unit will open with 15 beds, with the remaining 15 beds being added as more staff are hired for the unit.

There is no timeline for the when the 15-bed Internal Medicine Unit will open. Similarly, the fourth level of the facility is a “shell space” for a planned neonatal intensive care unit which, once open, would enable the delivery of specialized neonatal services.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara says the hospital expansion will allow more Westman residents to receive life-saving care closer to home and will reduce the number of patient transfers to other hospitals. That’s a glossy spin of the situation, however. Just two more beds are being added in the ICU at the moment, while only one-half of the originally planned 30 beds will be available in the Internal Medicine Unit. The 15-bed Internal Medicine Unit will sit empty and unused for the time being, while the promised neonatal unit is likely years away under even the most optimistic scenario.

That amounts to just 17 new beds being available in May for a cost to taxpayers of $120 million — more than $7 million per bed — and that is almost entirely due to the staffing shortages at the Brandon hospital and in Prairie Mountain Regional Health Authority facilities throughout Westman.

As was reported in Thursday’s Sun, the Prairie Mountain Health region is the hardest in Manitoba to staff, with a chronic and seemingly unsolvable shortage of nurses. That conclusion was echoed by a CBC report which revealed that a total of 1,697 full- and part-time nurses entered the province’s public health-care system between April 2024 and May of last year, but that a staggering 962 nurses left the system during that same period. Even worse, the report disclosed that Prairie Mountain Health experienced a net loss of 23 nurses (161 departures, but just 138 hires) during that time frame.

That trend likely explains why so many beds in our long-awaited and much-needed new critical care facility will remain unused for the foreseeable future. What those reports do not offer, however, is any basis for hope that a long-term solution to the problem will occur anytime soon.

Several months ago, when Asagwara bragged that the government had added hundreds of “net new nurses” to the province’s health-care system, we joined the Manitoba Nurses Union in asking where all those new nurses are. We ask that same question again, given the impact the shortage is having on the ability to fully utilize the new facility and, even more importantly, on patients’ quality of care.

In the CBC report, the minister’s department claims it is taking a co-ordinated approach to recruitment and retention, including “expanding pathways for internationally educated nurses, strengthening training and re-entry programs, and working directly with rural and regional partners.” That sounds reassuring, but we have been receiving similar assurances from the government for years now, and yet the staffing shortages continue at Prairie Mountain Health.

Collectively, Brandon University and Assiniboine College graduate dozens, if not hundreds, of new nurses annually. Where are they going? Why aren’t more of them choosing to work in Westman? How many of those graduates and other nurses end up leaving the profession, and why?

You can’t find solutions without asking the right questions, and you can’t operate a hospital safely without enough staff. Westman residents deserve a credible explanation for why their health-care facilities continue to be plagued by staffing shortages, along with a viable plan to fix the problem for the long term. Until that happens, beds will continue to sit empty at the Brandon hospital and patients will continue to bear the consequences.