NDP pledges to revive Mature Women’s Centre at Victoria hospital

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This article was published 14/09/2023 (763 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Staying with its health-care campaign theme, the Manitoba NDP has promised to resurrect the Mature Women’s Centre — a facility shuttered by the Tories in 2017.

“I think we can do this very quickly, and this will be a high priority,” NDP Leader Wab Kinew said Thursday outside Victoria General Hospital in Winnipeg. The Manitoba election is Oct. 3.

Until 2017, a team at Victoria provided such care as menopause transition, hysterectomy alternatives and other gynecological services. It included doctors and nurses, a pharmacist, dietitian and kinesiologist.

The program was shuttered six years ago by the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, as part of the Progressive Conservative government’s health-care consolidation.

The New Democrats’ $5-million plan to revive it motivated Dr. Sabrina Lee to show up at Thursday’s campaign event in her scrubs, after working a 24-hour shift at the downtown Women’s Hospital, where she helped two patients deliver babies.

“I came straight here… and am standing in the rain because this is really, really important,” said the doctor, who is in her final year of residency as a gynecologist.

The former centre provided expert care to women beyond their reproductive years, and is still being “mourned” by health-care providers, Lee said.

“We are ready to go,” she said. “A lot of the providers who were involved are still practising, with reduced capacity and reduced resources.

“Women in Manitoba are living in pain because of the fact we’ve cut those services and it’s not OK.”

Amanda Le Rougetel attended the NDP campaign event to say the “empathy and expertise” she received as a patient at the Mature Women’s Centre changed her life, after years of suffering.

“They listened to me. They treated me like a person, not a problem,” Le Rougetel said.

A 2022 study by the Menopause Foundation of Canada found nearly 50 per cent of women feel unprepared for menopause, 72 per cent said the advice they received from doctors was “unhelpful” or only “somewhat helpful,” and 38 per cent felt their symptoms were under-treated.

Canada’s average age for menopause (when menstrual periods have stopped for 12 consecutive months) is 51. The lead-up to menopause can last four to eight years.

The Mature Women’s Centre had provided care and treatment that improved health outcomes and lessened the strain on hospital operating rooms, said Lee.

“One big part of what this clinic was doing was outpatient procedures,” such as a hysteroscopy “to look inside the uterus, rule out cancer, do biopsies, take samplings of the uterine lining to make sure that you don’t have any cancer or pick up any cancer or pre-cancer,” Lee said.

“Currently, as things are, people tend to have to go through the main OR slates… That increases the wait times to get access to this procedure and it fills up the slates for the bigger cases.”

The former Mature Women’s Centre offered more than an ounce of prevention, too, said Lee. “With an aging population, this is a need that’s continuing to grow and that we need to give attention to. There is a ton of need.”

When asked to respond to the NDP promise to revive the Victoria centre, Progressive Conservative Leader Heather Stefanson said her government expanded such services at the Health Sciences Centre in 2019.

“Rather than going back to the other old facility, this was a brand-new, kind of state-of-the-art facility at HSC, and so we decided to look at expanding that there,” she said at a PC campaign event.

A spokesperson for Shared Health said the services once offered by the Mature Women’s Centre “remain available at providers throughout the community, with (obstetrician-gynecologists) and family physicians caring for the majority of patients. Patients requiring sub-specialist care are referred to the appropriate resources, including many that are offered at… Women’s Hospital.”

The Mature Women’s Centre started in 1994 at HSC, then moved to Victoria in 2006.

At the time of its closure in 2017, its medical director told the Free Press the facility saved more money each year through its daily programs than the province would save by closing it.

Kinew said re-establishing the centre at Victoria would require $5 million in capital spending and $2 million a year in operating funds.

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The NDP would also spend $3 million to expand pharmaceutical coverage for menopause hormone therapy replacement drugs — known to help prevent osteoporosis, prolong life and improve cognitive health.

“You really have the makings of a win-win here,” Kinew said.

“A win in terms of health in the community for women in Manitoba, a win in terms of the provincial health-care system and then a win in terms of preventative medicine by preventing osteoporosis and preventing potential hip fractures and other injuries… I think it’s a really important investment.”

— with files from Danielle Da Silva

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.