PCs target ER wait times

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This article was published 21/03/2016 (3495 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Leader Brian Pallister took the podium — on a pathway at Grant’s Old Mill just south of Grace General Hospital — and paused a few moments, gazing at his watch.

“That was 10 seconds,” he told reporters. “It seemed a lot longer, didn’t it?

“How would you like to wait for six hours? Because that’s the average wait time here.”

Pallister turned his attention to health care today, promising that a Progressive Conservative government would tackle the nagging problem of excruciatingly long emergency room waits in Manitoba, particularly in Winnipeg.

In December, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) said a Winnipeg hospital — Concordia — had the longest recorded ER waits in the nation. In the previous two years, that dubious honour went to the Grace. 

“This has to change,” Pallister said.

He repeated a PC pledge to create a wait times task force to tackle the problem.

The task force would consult with frontline workers, health professionals and “impacted stakeholders” and report back within six months.

It would include an “in-depth analysis” of who is seeking treatment at ERs and for what conditions, identify roadblocks and solutions to improved access and look for opportunities to enhance preventative measures.

Last year, CIHI found that four of the Canadian hospitals with the longest ER wait times were in Winnipeg. Victoria and St. Boniface hospitals joined Concordia, Grace and an eastern Canadian facility in that group.

Concordia staff were able to see 90 per cent of the patients lined up in its ER within seven hours, CIHI found. At Grace hospital, the wait was 6.3 hours, an improvement over 7.9 hours the previous year. The Winnipeg average last year was 5.7 hours, while the Canadian average was 3.1 hours.

“Manitobans are not getting results when it comes to health care. They’re not getting access,” Pallister said. “Seventeen years, the NDP has had to keep their promises on this file. I’m asking for a chance to keep my promises.”

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He said the PCs would also target long waits for joint replacement and cataract surgeries. A Tory government would set performance targets and be willing to boost funding in critical areas to achieve results, he said.

Pallister did not say he would seek answers from the private sector to cure Manitoba’s wait times problem, but that didn’t stop the Manitoba NDP from raising it as a possibility.

“We’re concerned that the task force he has announced today would amount to a health-care privatization panel. That’s not the answer families are looking for when it comes to the services they count on,” the New Democrats said in a statement.

Last week, Pallister promised to cut the fees patients are charged for ambulance transports in half. Manitoba has the highest ambulance fees in the country, he said.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca