New St. B ER great, but where are all the doctors to staff it?

Opinion

When governments announce a major hospital expansion, it’s usually billed as a silver bullet solution to long wait times and overcrowding.

The latest example is St. Boniface Hospital’s newly expanded and renovated emergency department, expected to open officially on Oct. 2. (It was supposed to open next week, but there’s been a delay).

On paper, it looks impressive: more treatment spaces, updated facilities, a modern design intended to improve patient experience.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the facelift won’t do much — if anything — to cut ER wait times. If history is any guide, the experience for patients at St. Boniface will look remarkably similar to what it’s been for years — hours-long waits, gurneys lined up in hallways and admitted patients languishing in the emergency department because there’s no staffed hospital bed to move them into.

The median ER wait time at the hospital was 4.85 hours in July, up from 4.28 hours for the same month in 2024, according to Winnipeg Regional Health Authority data. That has more than doubled since 2018 when it was well under two hours. (The median wait time is the point at which half of patients wait longer and half wait less).

“Our emergency department redevelopment project was strategically developed in consultation with the community to improve patient and staff experiences and ensure timelier access to care, while maximizing functionality and flexibility and providing expanded space for increased numbers of patients,” it says on the hospital’s website.

Timelier access to care? Not unless they add more doctors, nurses and other front-line staff.

You can expand an ER all you want. Unless you have the staff and the downstream capacity to move patients through the system, you’re just creating a bigger warehouse for sick people to wait in.

Unless you have the staff and the downstream capacity to move patients through the system, you’re just creating a bigger warehouse for sick people to wait in.

Take Grace Hospital, which renovated and vastly expanded the size of its ER in 2018. Seven years later, median wait times have more than doubled from below two hours to 4.93 hours in July 2025.

St. Boniface Hospital has long been one of the worst facilities in Winnipeg for emergency waits.

Why? Because the ER isn’t really the problem. The bottleneck isn’t at the front door — it’s further inside. Too many patients who need to be admitted to a ward are stuck in the ER for hours or even days because there aren’t enough staffed beds on the medical and surgical floors.

That means ER doctors and nurses are forced to care for admitted patients who should already be upstairs. It clogs the entire system.

What’s missing from St. Boniface’s ER expansion is any commitment to hire more nurses, physicians and support staff. A bigger ER without more staff is like building a bigger restaurant without hiring more servers or cooks. You can put in as many tables as you want, but if there’s nobody to serve the food, people will still be waiting at the door.

The other piece that’s being ignored is bed capacity on the wards. Unless there are more staffed inpatient beds, patients admitted from the ER will still be stuck downstairs. And the longer they stay in the ER, the longer everybody else waits.

The ER becomes a holding tank, not a treatment space. Nurses are stretched thin trying to provide care in an environment never designed for it. Families are frustrated, patients are exhausted and staff burn out.

A renovated ER may create more space for those gurneys and add more equipment and technology. But it doesn’t solve the problem of having nowhere to put patients once they’ve been admitted. It just means the “temporary” warehouse has shinier walls.

Real solutions take longer, cost more and don’t make for flashy news conferences.

Expansions like this are politically attractive. They’re tangible. A premier or health minister can stand in front of cameras and cut a ribbon, claiming credit for “fixing” emergency care. It looks like action.

But it isn’t. Real solutions take longer, cost more and don’t make for flashy news conferences. Hiring more staff, creating incentives to keep experienced nurses, adding inpatient capacity and investing in long-term care beds so hospitals aren’t filled with people who don’t belong there — those are the changes that actually reduce wait times.

Those require tough policy decisions and sustained investment. It’s much easier to build a bigger ER and declare victory.

This isn’t just about numbers on a spreadsheet. ER waits are measured in hours, but their impact is measured in human suffering. Delayed care leads to worse outcomes.

St. Boniface Hospital may soon have a bigger, newer emergency department. But patients shouldn’t expect their wait times to improve any time soon.

The government may get its ribbon-cutting photo op, but for patients stuck on gurneys in hallways, nothing will really change.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca