Urgent situation for urgent care in Winkler area

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This article was published 26/02/2024 (590 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A southern Manitoba walk-in clinic is being forced to see patients by appointment only, as a shortage of physicians and nurse practitioners plagues communities across the province.

Winkler-based physician and president of the Manitoba College of Family Physicians Dr. Ganesan Abbu has been practising at C.W. Wiebe Medical Centre in southern Manitoba since 1998.

When COVID-19 hit in 2020, the centre’s urgent-care clinic became appointment-only, shutting down accessible walk-in options for the nearly 14,000 people living in the area.

The clinic has continued to operate on an appointment-only basis in the aftermath of the pandemic because of the shortage of doctors and nurses in the region.

Capacity each day is currently down to about half the number they were once able to accommodate, Abbu said.

“We were seeing over 100… 120 (people) a day previously. But now, because it’s all on an appointment basis, the numbers are very restricted,” he said.

“When you speak to patients, it’s terrible, because they just can’t get in.”

Appointments for between 50 and 60 patients open every day — some online, some in-person — at about 8 a.m.

By 9 a.m., they are always all filled, Abbu said, and the system leaves many people with limited choices. Some who try unsuccessfully to get an appointment several times end up in Boundary Trails Health Centre’s emergency room and wait hours to deal with a low-acuity issue at a hospital that is struggling with severe staff shortages, as well.

Others give up and go home, unable to access needed health advice or treatment.

One of Abbu’s family members recently faced the same problem: after waking up sick with what appeared to be strep throat, she was turned away at the clinic on successive days and landed at Boundary Trails’ ER in order to see a doctor.

“When you speak to patients, it’s terrible, because they just can’t get in.”–Dr. Ganesan Abbu

“That’s what people do,” Abbu said. “Your default is to go to the ER, and you end up clogging up the system there with something that could be handled very easily in the clinic. That’s what people do. They have no choice.”

Exacerbating its doctor shortage, Boundary Trails is also facing a 52 per cent nurse vacancy rate, a shortage severe enough that administration is considering consolidating units and closing beds.

The “walk-in” clinic at Menzies Medical Centre in Morden (which has a population of nearly 10,000 people) is also conducting business on an appointment-only basis.

Abbu said Menzies treats approximately 30 patients daily, and those spots fill up quickly, too.

“Some choose to wait outside the clinic before our doors open to ensure a spot,” a note on Menzies Medical Centre’s website reads.

In 2022, C.W. Wiebe announced it would be reducing its urgent-care hours as physicians attempted to balance responsibilities there and at Boundary Trails. The reduced hours remain.

There are currently 24 family physicians at C.W. Wiebe, but Abbu said they very rarely have time to work within their specialty because they are frequently forced to take on emergency cases at Boundary Trails.

“Your default is to go to the ER, and you end up clogging up the system there with something that could be handled very easily in the clinic.”–Dr. Ganesan Abbu

“Physicians are being pulled in so many directions. A lot of them work at the hospital. In fact, most of the family doctors don’t do much community-based family medicine. That’s the reality,” he said.

“They’re doing everything else… ER doctors, anesthesia, dialysis, chemotherapy, palliative care, long-term care.”

It’s not a problem unique to the southernmost area of the province, said Doctors Manitoba president Dr. Michael Boroditsky.

“With a record shortage of physicians, we are seeing more and more service disruptions across Manitoba. In some communities, it has meant reduced hours or closures of walk-in clinics, and in others it has meant the same for their local ER,” he said in an email.

“When one service is disrupted, whether it’s walk-in or same-day clinic access or an ER closure, it places more pressure on the services left trying to cope and meet patient needs.”

In June, the Brandon Clinic announced it would be shutting down its walk-in services, citing burnout caused by a severe shortage of physicians and heavy workloads. Data from Doctors Manitoba indicates between 150,000 and 200,000 residents in the province do not have a family doctor.

Manitoba has the troubling distinction of being the province with the fewest per capita family physicians and second-lowest number of doctors per capita in Canada.

Doctors Manitoba has long advocated for the province to adopt a “team-based” model to primary care, which would assemble a range of medical professionals into one centre, cutting down on patient visits. While campaigning last year, the provincial NDP promised it would fund five neighbourhood clinics, four in Winnipeg and one in Brandon, using this model.

“With a record shortage of physicians, we are seeing more and more service disruptions across Manitoba.”–Dr. Michael Boroditsky

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said the provincial government is exploring expanding minor injury clinic access across Manitoba after a four-week pilot project at the Health Sciences Centre in January that provided HSC’s minor treatment clinic funding to add an extra physician seven days a week.

“We didn’t get to where we are in primary care overnight, and we’re not going to fix it overnight,” Asagwara said. “But we are committed to every single day working with physicians in rural Manitoba, in places where there’s some of the highest need, to move things in a better direction.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Malak Abas
Reporter

Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg’s North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.

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