Katie May

Manitoba has stopped sending hospital patients from Winnipeg to rural Manitoba, but the inter-regional transfer policy city hospitals relied upon to free up beds during COVID-19 surges remains in place.

No patients have been transferred as part of the controversial protocol since late July, a Shared Health spokesman stated.

Since last fall, 353 patients have been transferred to hospitals outside their home health regions because of a lack of available beds in Winnipeg.

The focus lately has been on “repatriating” patients who live outside the city by transporting them to health centres closer to home,”to continue their care, when clinically appropriate, at sites closer to their home and support networks,” Shared Health stated.

Melita’s ER is on track to reopen next week after additional delays rooted in staff shortages.

The Melita Health Centre in the southwestern corner of the province next to the Saskatchewan border shut down for the summer due to lack of staff. It was supposed to reopen after the Labour Day long weekend, but some residents grew concerned when that didn’t happen.

The hospital is set to start admitting patients again later this week, while the emergency department is expected to reopen the week of Sept. 19, Mayor Bill Holden said Monday. It will initially open for 12 hours a day, with EMS staff set to fill in. A local focus group of councillors, citizens and health representatives has been meeting over the past couple of weeks to try to find a solution, Holden said, explaining the health centre couldn’t open sooner because staffing is still a major problem. Only now, they’re trying to convince staff to come back after a two-month summer shutdown.

“We want to try and open this facility and bring it back to what we had before. We’re still having trouble getting physicians to relocate and actually stay in these smaller communities — we’re not the only one,” Holden said.

Winnipeg’s transit union stressed it is endorsing Glen Murray for mayor and asked another candidate to remove its reference to the union on her website.

The Amalgamated Transit Union issued a news release Friday to clarify it is endorsing Murray, and asked his opponent Jenny Motkaluk to remove a photo and quote related to the transit union from her posted platform, saying they were included on her site without prior knowledge or approval.

The transit union is part of the Winnipeg Labour Council, a coalition of unions with about 43,000 members, announced its endorsement of Murray last month.

Motkaluk’s online platform includes an image of a transit bus as well as a photo of her with union local 1505 president Romeo Ignacio, along with a quote attributed to Ignacio stating: “Our political leaders should be doing something to address the growing concerns about safety for our workers, city workers, and for the public transit users.”

A judge decided to overstep her jurisdiction by granting biological parents weekly visits with their child once he is adopted by his foster family, after she identified a gap in Manitoba’s child-protection law.

The family court decision Aug. 30 points to systemic problems, bias, and a series of errors made by Child and Family Services social workers who failed to work with African immigrants whose children were apprehended while the mother was accused of criminal charges.

During the trial, shortly after his home address became part of the court record, the biological father was deported to Nigeria — five years after his student visa had expired.

Justice Kaye Dunlop rejected assessments that found him unfit to be a father. The judge said CFS didn’t help the biological parents.

An internationally educated nurse has won the right to be registered to work in Manitoba after she became certified elsewhere in Canada.

Ronna Sigua, who was educated in the Philippines, won her appeal to the Council of the College of Registered Nurses following her July 26 hearing. On that same day, the provincial government issued a compliance order under the Labour Mobility Act that instructed the college to remove the clinical assessment requirement “effective immediately.”

The college was violating domestic trade agreements by not allowing Sigua to work unless she completed additional assessments.

Sigua tried to register as a nurse in Manitoba in 2013, but the college informed her she needed additional education, and that the type of education she needed wasn’t available in Manitoba. Refresher courses in the province that are designed for international nurses wouldn’t suffice, Sigua was told, according to the panel’s written decision. In 2017, Sigua completed an international-nurses bridge program in Quebec and passed Quebec’s professional nursing exam. She was registered as a nurse in Quebec, and later in Ontario through mobility legislation. But when she applied again to Manitoba’s college in March 2021, she was told she couldn’t be registered until she completed a clinical competency assessment, even though she was registered elsewhere in Canada.