Province adding medical, surgical beds at Grace Hospital to relieve strain on ER

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This article was published 29/11/2023 (648 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The addition of 31 treatment beds at Grace Hospital over the next year is being hailed as an “important first step” in relieving the strain on the west Winnipeg facility’s frequently overwhelmed emergency department.

The plan, announced Wednesday by Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, includes opening 10 new medicine beds before March 31, along with 10 more and 11 surgical beds over the next year.

The announcement was delivered 12 days after the death of a patient who was being treated and awaiting transfer to an in-patient bed over a period of 33 hours in a Grace ER hallway.

Asagwara said the Grace has been “struggling” and the challenges have taken a toll on staff.

“The Grace Hospital has had a lot of attention in recent months, but not the kind of attention that anyone wants,” Asagwara said. “And not the attention that anyone who works here deserves.

“While these beds alone aren’t the solution to the challenges that we are facing, they will help relieve some of the pressure. But it’s important for us all to understand that these beds will only work when we are committed to improving the flow of patients through the emergency department. These beds will only work if we remain committed to recruiting and training and, most importantly, to retaining our health-care human resources.”

The new beds will allow the facility to create a family medicine unit — the Grace is the only hospital in the province with an ER that does not have such a unit — and relieve congestion by getting patients into treatment wards more quickly.

The health minister said officials don’t want to be “too prescriptive” on numbers, but are set to allocate about $3 million in operating funds to increase staffing at the Grace. Details on how the hospital will acquire the additional people required to put the additional beds into use were not released.

There are 75 full-time positions needed to staff the additional beds, including nurses, allied health workers and non-clinical staff such as housekeeping and record-keeping, a Winnipeg Regional Health Authority spokesperson said.

The expansion will be phased in to ensure appropriate resources are in place to open the beds, and targeted recruitment efforts will be part of the implementation plan,” the spokesperson said.

The hospital currently has 111 surgical and 106 medical beds.

Dr. Ramin Hamedani, the hospital’s chief medical officer, praised the announcement, calling it an “important first step” that will help patient flow.

“The work will begin, I’m very positive we will achieve this,” Hamedani said, adding he is grateful for the health minister’s announcement and to “everyone who’s been supporting our cry for help, if you will.”

Progressive Conservative Health critic Kathleen Cook questioned the government’s ability to get the beds in use without a corresponding plan to staff them. She said the public needs to know how many workers, and in what disciplines, the expansion requires.

“I think this is part of a pattern we’re starting to see emerge: somewhat ad-hoc, half-baked health-care announcements coming out from this government,” said Cook, the MLA for Roblin. “What they announce sounds good, but the devil’s in the details, and the details are missing.”

Doctors have called for more in-patient beds, including in Doctors Manitoba’s most recent Prescription for Health Care report, as “an essential component for any plan to reduce wait times.”

“We are happy to see another step towards achieving this today, and we look forward to working with the government on plans to recruit the needed physicians in the middle of a record doctor shortage,” said a spokesperson for the physicians’ advocacy organization.

The Nov. 18 ER death at the Grace sparked an internal safety review, the results of which have not been released by the WRHA.

“I know that situation was incredibly tragic and still weighs on people’s minds,” Asagwara said, adding the incident is still under review and more information “will come in time.”

The Free Press has reported on several other recent instances of patients languishing in the hospital’s hallways — sometimes for more than a week at a time — due to a lack of beds.

Wednesday’s announcement marks the first step in a “data-informed” strategy to increase the number of acute-care beds at facilities throughout the province, with further details to be shared in coming weeks, Asagwara said.

The health minister also recently announced the province is allocating $2.75 million to support hiring allied health staff, including social workers and physiotherapists, to allow patient discharges on the weekend, which will improve patient flow out of the emergency department. An additional $6.9 million is earmarked to be spent on alleviating the problem over the next year.

— with files from Tyler Searle

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Katie May
Multimedia producer

Katie May is a multimedia producer for the Free Press.

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