Nurses take issue with Tories’ ‘patient-blaming’

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This article was published 27/01/2023 (981 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba Nurses Union is accusing the province of laying a guilt trip on the public for backed-up Winnipeg emergency rooms when government austerity is to blame.

Since last year, government ads saying close to 40 per cent of such patients could get the care they need sooner at a family doctor’s office or walk-in clinic have been running online.

This week, the nurses union is pointing to Canadian Institute for Health Information data that show there were many more low-acuity patients going to the ER in 2016-17 (48 per cent), while wait times were shorter.

Five years later, with fewer lower-acuity patients and a lower volume of visits, ER waits are worse — and the nurses blame Tory belt-tightening for it.

“I think it has a lot to do with the austerity agenda of this government,” said MNU president Darlene Jackson.

When the Progressive Conservatives took power in 2016, they embarked on a hospital consolidation plan to streamline services. The massive reform resulted in the closure of three of Winnipeg’s six emergency rooms.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, there was no fat left to trim and ERs and ICUs were overwhelmed, the MNU said.

Emergency rooms remain backed up with long waits, although Shared Health released data Thursday showing a drop in ER visits and waits in the month of December.

In 2016-2017, there were 329,910 Manitoba ER visits. In 2021-22, there were 273,384. In the first nine months of fiscal 2022-23, there were 193,352.

In April 2016, ER wait times were five hours; in October 2022, waits were nearly eight hours. Lengths of stay are up in the ER, as well, as patients wait for a staffed medicine bed on a ward or a personal care home bed to become available.

Longer ER stays contribute to illness and death, according to Manitoba’s 2017 wait time reduction task force report.

In 2016-17, the average length of stay in an ER was 11.9 hours. In 2021-22, it was 20.6 hours — the longest in Canada among the eight provinces and territories that participated in a CIHI study. The average was 12.4 hours.

Such data show the root of the ER problem began before the pandemic, MNU said, and it wants the PC government to acknowledge that and the fact patients seeking non-urgent care are not the root cause.

“What I’m taking exception to is patient-blaming,” Jackson said of the push for Winnipeggers to go to a walk-in clinic or a family doctor for non-urgent issues rather than a hospital ER.

Jackson said she is especially concerned about inner-city residents, for whom the Health Sciences Centre emergency room may be their only or best primary care option.

“A lot of these patients don’t have a family doctor… and the ability to get to a different facility doesn’t happen,” Jackson said.

“You can’t close the door on options for these individuals and not provide a different, reasonable option, in a place they can access it, and then turn around and blame the patients.”

Health Minister Audrey Gordon did not respond to a request for comment.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority defended the ads launched in October.

“It’s important to note this campaign was never intended to be a cure-all for emergency and urgent care wait times,” a WRHA spokesperson said in an email.

The WRHA hasn’t tracked how many patients have heeded the message. However, the Walk-In Connected Care and Walk-In Clinic websites have received more than 320,000 page views combined, and the MyRightCare.ca site had 1.3 million views since it launched in October.

The government campaign nudging patients to seek non-urgent care at a clinic or doctor’s office is a “disingenuous” tactic that’s been used before by provinces to divert attention from deeper, more complex problems that need to be addressed, a MNU statement said.

A position paper by the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (cited in the 2017 wait time reduction task force report) acknowledged “inappropriate use of the (emergency department) across Canada” was getting a lot of media attention. However, “the primary cause” was hospital crowding — or “access block” — the inability of patients in the ER to access inpatient beds when they need to be admitted to hospital.

Uzoma Asagwara, a nurse and health critic for the NDP, said it’s important for Manitobans to be educated in terms of where is the best place to access care when they need it — but they’re not the reason wait times are so high.

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“It is because there’s an ongoing crisis of staffing in our hospitals,” Asagwara said. “I think the government’s focus… is an attempt to distract Manitobans from the fact that they have failed to properly hire staff at our hospitals and these waits are a direct result of that.”

The MLA for Union Station said inadequate home care services and not enough personal care home beds are compounding the pressure on hospitals.

“A lot of the folks who are presenting at the hospital and now need admittance to hospital wards are people who, in the community — had they received appropriate and consistent home care — could’ve been healthier in their communities,” Asagwara said.

“They wouldn’t have needed to even go to hospital or be admitted or end up in a personal care home.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

Carol Sanders
Legislature reporter

Carol Sanders is a reporter at the Free Press legislature bureau. The former general assignment reporter and copy editor joined the paper in 1997. Read more about Carol.

Every piece of reporting Carol produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.