No deadline to part ways with most private nursing agencies: province

The province is taking its time in reducing its reliance on for-profit agency nurses to staff the public health system.

After staffing struggles prompted the government to backpedal on a Jan. 15 deadline for health regions to sever ties with all but four private nursing agencies, the province isn’t committing to a new target date.

“The transition to the selected nursing agency model remains underway, and timelines are being guided by operational readiness and patient safety needs across regions,” Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara’s press secretary said Monday.

Anja Sadovski said in the email health regions are being given flexibility to work with a larger number of agencies to maintain care.

“Our priority remains patient safety and ensuring appropriate staffing levels, and Manitobans will be updated as progress continues,” she said.

Prior to Jan. 15, the Manitoba Nurses Union warned that critical staff shortages at Dauphin, Pine Falls and other hospitals could be exacerbated if the province cut ties with more than 70 private agencies before the travel nurse team, a float pool, had enough staff to handle the transition.

The province launched the pool in late 2022 to help reduce the reliance and spending on for-profit agencies that soared to $80 million in 2024-25, up from $26.9 million in 2020-21, according to Shared Health data.

On Jan. 20, the province backed away from the Jan. 15 deadline. On Monday, it wouldn’t provide a target date for when the transition to four agencies — Elite Intellicare Staffing, Integra Health, Bayshore HealthCare and Augury Healthcare — will be completed.

“You can’t make an announcement and then not have some type of assurance that everything you need to be in place is in place to make it succeed,” nurses union president Darlene Jackson said Monday.

“It’s concerning because there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars being poured into the private for-profit agencies that should be going into our public health-care system.”

She said the provincial float nurse pool, as of Jan. 31, increased to 706 nurses from 555 on Dec. 31.

“If you set your infrastructure up and you do appropriate planning, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” said Jackson.