Editorials

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Expand walk-in care

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 08/29/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority is on track to pay more than $1 million this year to the city's ambulance service for the time paramedics spend at the side of patients they bring and must wait for care in emergency wards. There is, of course, a better way to spend that money -- to expand the walk-in care available in the community.

Logically, the expensive new tab ought to have seen paramedics waiting less time. Yet what started last year as a hefty $60,000 bill has risen steeply. In May, the paramedic service billed the WRHA $192,000. To the end of June, the bill came to $785,934.

This is an old problem, one most Winnipeggers who have had to sit for hours in an ER can attest to -- among the non-urgent cases, the gurneys get priority, jumping the queue to get ambulance attendants back on the road. The WRHA has opened community medical sites, such as the Pan Am Clinic, for those whose ailments are not emergencies. But the WRHA says the demand continues to rise in step.

Where does a taxpayer-funded agency find an extra million dollars or so in its budget? The answer is evident to anyone who has watched the rising chunk that the health department takes of annual provincial revenues. While it would be simplistic to force the WRHA to cut other expenses, the rigour of a legitimate concept of living within the budget appears to have gone out the window as the paramedic service recoups the cost of the ER waits.

Hospital care is a costly way to diagnose a compressed disk or an inner-ear infection. The non-urgent problems arriving at ERs, (about 50 per cent of visits) should be the responsibility of family doctors or community clinics. Aside from expanding walk-in hours during the day, family doctors and private clinics should be open in "off" hours.

The province and the WRHA, to a lesser degree, have influence through funding agreements over how privately run community medical care operates. That influence should be used in negotiations for salaries or fee-for-service payments so community clinics are open earlier and later with walk-in care.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 29, 2012 A10

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