It was the kind of announcement that should have brought universal applause.
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It was the kind of announcement that should have brought universal applause.
It was the kind of announcement that should have brought universal applause.
Instead, on Tuesday, when Premier Wab Kinew recently announced his government had recruited more than 4,700 net new health-care professionals and support workers, the proclamation was met with quite a few rolling eyes.
Unions representing health-care staff reacted more with disdain than gratitude. The Manitoba Nurses Union continued its inexplicable war of attrition with the Kinew government, with president Darlene Jackson openly questioning the veracity of the premier’s math.
The province has added 4,725 net new health-care workers, Premier Wab Kinew told reporters Tuesday.
Why all the grumpiness? Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, probably said it best. “The metric that matters is whether Manitobans wait less time for care tomorrow than they did yesterday,” he said.
The Kinew government’s good-news announcement is tempered with the knowledge that emergency department wait times remain stubbornly high. And it’s not just Manitoba; there isn’t a single province that can say it has achieved a lasting reduction in the amount of time it takes to get treatment at a hospital ER.
Despite massive increases in funding, the provinces are trapped in a doom loop of increased demand and acuity and health officials don’t necessarily know what to do about it.
Many provinces, including Manitoba, are attempting to deal with wait times in part by building more capacity in emergency medicine by adding or expanding new ERs and recruiting the staff needed to treat increasing numbers of patients.
Those are not the wrong things to be doing. But it appears that expanding ER capacity is not, on its own, going to reduce wait times. What will?
National health-care organizations, including the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Institute for Health Information, have consistently argued the real problem is the lack of downstream capacity for patients who no longer need emergency or hospital treatment but require some sort of ongoing, long-term care and oversight.
A June 2026 report published by CIHI noted that more patients — and more gravely ill patients — than ever before are showing up at ERs. However, the report noted that there are still “insufficient connected community resources, and little continuing and long-term care.”
Source: Read the original article on www.winnipegfreepress.com
