More beds for St. Boniface Hospital in bid to reduce ER strain By: Carol Sanders Posted: 1:46 PM CST Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024 Last Modified: 7:05 PM CST Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024 Updates

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In the St. Boniface Hospital emergency room, the wait time was more than 13 hours. In the building’s atrium, Premier Wab Kinew and Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara were promising to add 36 medicine beds to cut that number.

“Our hope is that all of these beds will come on line within a year,” Asagwara said Wednesday afternoon at a news conference in the Winnipeg hospital.

The plan is to start adding staff and beds in late March, and adding more beds as more staff are hired, officials said.

Adding in-patient beds is a “vital step” toward reducing ER wait times, St. B emergency department medical director Dr. Paul Ratana told reporters.

The emergency room gets jammed with patients waiting to be moved to a hospital bed on a ward, the doctor said, noting the wait time was more than 13 hours at midday.

“We’ve had better days,” said Ratana, who’s worked at St. Boniface Hospital for 15 years. “There are many days where virtually all of the beds in the emergency department are occupied by patients who’ve already been seen and assessed and who require admission to hospital, but their movement to the wards can’t occur for hours or in some cases days.

“The inability to move patients is, in my experience, the No. 1 reason that wait times are excessive.”

The problem, referred to as “access block,” prevents patients from getting out of the waiting room and into treatment spaces.

“The more staffed beds we have on in-patient units, the more capacity the emergency department has to move patients out of the emergency department and into units in a timely way. That is why today’s announcement is of importance,” Ratana said.

“This goes some way to starting that trip to building back the capacity that’s been stripped out of the system.”

On Nov. 29, the province announced Grace Hospital will receive 31 new beds by the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year, including 10 that will open before March 31.

A Doctors Manitoba report from late 2023 said more in-patient beds are “an essential component for any plan to reduce wait times.”

When asked where the province will find the staff for 36 additional beds at St. Boniface Hospital amid a Canada-wide nursing shortage, the health minister (who is a registered nurse) said they’re looking to new nursing school graduates, internationally educated nurses and recruiting those who’ve previously left the public system.

“There are many different approaches we’re taking to this,” Asagwara said. “We are reaching out to students, we’re retaining staff in our health-care system and we’re recruiting and training more health-care workers.”

Hospital bed capacity and morale on the front lines were stripped out of the health-care system by the previous Tory government and it’s going to take time to build it back up, the NDP minister said.

The Kinew government is intent on resetting the relationship with health-care staff as part of its plan to heal health care, Asagwara added.

The health minister and premier were scheduled to return to St. Boniface Hospital at 7:30 a.m. Thursday, during a shift change, to meet with health-care workers and front-line staff.

It’s the second stop on their province-wide “listening tour” that began Dec. 8 at Grace Hospital in Winnipeg.

“This work is being guided by what we hear from the front lines and from the expertise of the people who are at the bedside,” Kinew said. “We’re going to keep coming back. We’re going to keep checking back.

“We’re committed to an ongoing collaboration of working together.”

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.

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