Frustrated Manitobans driving to Moose Jaw for heart scans

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This article was published 19/03/2024 (569 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A growing wait list for elective heart scans in Manitoba is prompting some residents to drive to Saskatchewan and pay for the tests.

At the South Saskatchewan Heart Clinic in Moose Jaw, Dr. Jeffrey Wilkinson says his private facility is seeing a handful of Manitobans make the drive to get echocardiograms each week.

“If you’re waiting on a heart test for a year, that’s a really big problem. People are gonna demand reasonable access to health-care services… a lot of patients are living in fear and anxiety,” Wilkinson told the Free Press.

The clinic, located about 650 kilometres west of Winnipeg, performs echocardiograms, which use sound waves to track blood flow through the heart and heart valves and can help health-care providers diagnose heart conditions, for a fee.

The clinic went private in October, when it opted out of Saskatchewan’s publicly funded heath-care system after struggling to meet its costs under the province’s fee structure.

A consultation and an electrocardiogram — a standard procedure before an echocardiogram — runs patients $350 at the clinic. Wilkinson wouldn’t reveal how much the clinic charges for heart scans.

The wait list at the clinic is between one and two weeks for an echocardiogram, despite the growing number of out-of-towners seeking health-care, Wilkinson said.

“It’s their heart, it’s important,” he said.

Max Johnson has been waiting more than three months to get an appointment for an echocardiogram.

In November the retiree was grounded after travelling to Tbilisi in Georgia — a country located at the intersection of Europe and Asia — due to a blood clot. A clinic in Georgia then found Johnson had a heart issue and referred him to a cardiologist when he got back to Winnipeg.

“Now I’m in the ‘waiting room’ for an appointment, and that’s when you really don’t know when you’ll be seen,” Johnson said.

Shared Health said the median wait time for elective echocardiograms is 30 weeks, but patients triaged as needing a scan on an urgent or semi-urgent basis are prioritized and generally do not wait long.

However, Wilkinson said patients making the near seven-hour drive to Moose Jaw can’t or won’t wait that long.

Johnson has previously travelled to Lithuania for elective knee surgery, and said he would travel again if he doesn’t get an appointment for a heart scan soon.

“The not knowing is the hardest,” he said. “If they would turn around and say, ‘Your appointment is July the 8th,’ I would grumble, but live with it. But it’s that the requisition goes into this void and there’s nothing you can do but wait.”

The union representing specialized health-care workers said the province is falling behind on national wait times for heart scans.

Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, said accepted benchmarks are 30 days or less for elective echocardiograms, less than seven days for urgent scans and under 24 hours for emergencies.

“We’re seeing Manitoba significantly higher than other jurisdictions,” Linklater said.

Most elective cardiac scans in Winnipeg are performed at either Health Sciences Centre or St. Boniface Hospital, which have cardiology staff vacancies and are contributing to the rising number of patients seeking diagnostic tests at private clinics, the union president said.

Prota Clinic, a private facility in the city, was doing echocardiograms for a fee between 2017 and last March, when the province ordered a stop after the federal government found Prota had been charging patients contrary to the Canada Health Act and its diagnostic services policy.

The private medical centre had charged patients more than $353,000 for necessary tests, leading to a clawback in provincial health funding.

Linklater said Manitobans shouldn’t have to flee to the private sector to find health care and insisted the province do more to recruit and retain specialized health-care workers.

“We have an opportunity here to build capacity within the public system. And certainly that’s what we believe is the best approach towards solving this problem; it’s more cost-effective, there’s more accountability, and it provides better connected and co-ordinated care which really, really matters for patients and providers,” he said.

In February Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier Wab Kinew announced funding to move on the NDP government’s plan to hire more doctors and nurses, but Johnson pointed to administration as the real flaw in the province’s health-care system.

“Our requests get passed from so many hands to so many computers. And by the time it finally spits it out, it’s been a reasonably long time,” said the retired travel agency owner.

A Shared Health spokesperson said a new scanning machine and technologist were added at Grace Hospital in January, which freed up space for 120 echocardiograms to be performed each month.

Johnson is planning to travel back to Tbilisi at the end of May and says if he still doesn’t have an appointment with a doctor at home he’ll pay to have it done in Georgia.

“I’m very fortunate that I have the resources that I can take advantage of — going out of town or out of country,” he said. “But I think of the thousands of people for that is simply not an option.”

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca