Manitoba adds hip, knee surgeries; makes traction on wait lists

The province says it is ramping up hip and knee replacements by 200 surgeries after expanding capacity by more than 800 procedures a year at Selkirk, while reducing Manitoba’s median wait time to within the recommended six months.

“This is life-changing,” Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said Friday at a news conference at the Selkirk Regional Health Centre.

Manitoba set a record for fiscal 2025-26 when 7,156 hip and knee surgeries were performed. In total, there were 6,684 procedures in the previous fiscal year, provincial data show.

The median wait time across the province, meanwhile, was 22 weeks — less than the national recommendation of within 24 weeks.

In 2024, Shared Health announced $5.7 million would be pegged at expanding operating space and adding staff at the Selkirk facility so 800 additional surgeries could be performed. It exceeded the target by performing 813 joint replacements in 2025-26.

In 2026, the provincial budget included an additional $1.7 million to increase the number of hip and knee replacements by 200.

Selkirk resident Melanie Shumilak is looking forward to getting a new knee.

“I’m 68 and I want my mobility back,” Shumilak said at Friday’s news conference.

She suffered with knee pain for 10 years but was leery of getting replacements. As her mobility declined, she missed out on opportunities, such as climbing a waterfall on a trip to Iceland, she said.

A friend’s positive experience with knee replacements encouraged her to get the surgery. She had her first knee replaced in Selkirk eight weeks ago and went home the same day. Now, she looks forward to getting the second one done in September.

“There are still many waterfalls I want to climb,” Shumilak said.

The 200 additional procedures this fiscal year will be performed at hospitals around the province.

“It wasn’t that long ago that the norm was that Manitobans would be sent out of the country, out of the province — that only those who could afford to take the time away from work and had family who could go with them was that an option for them,”Asagwara said. “We’ve taken a different approach.”

Over the last two years, the province recruited seven new arthroplasty surgeons for Selkirk, Brandon and Winnipeg’s Grace and Concordia hospitals. Four graduating residents who left for secondary training outside Manitoba to become specialists are expected to come back after receiving job offers in the province, said Dr. Ed Buchel, Shared Health’s provincial surgery specialty lead.

“Typically, we would not have the ability to even talk to those residents and say ‘would you consider coming back?,’” Buchel said. “We have not had the structure or even the will to say ‘We want you to come back’ and we didn’t have the resources, honestly, to bring them back,” he said. “When they go away, other people can poach them from us.”

That changed as the province built capacity in the system to deliver good care and made commitments to surgeons-in-training by giving them letters of intent for job placements, he said.

Patients, meanwhile, continue to be prioritized through Manitoba’s centralized surgical wait-list system, which ensures more patients receive care based on clinical need and length of wait, the minister said.

The median wait for hip and knee surgeries varies widely: the wait for a procedure at Selkirk is just eight weeks, while the wait at Brandon Regional Health Centre is 56 weeks.

“Our goal is that Brandon will improve as we develop more capacity,” Buchel said.

It’s partnering with Morden-Winkler’s Boundary Trails Health Centre, while surgeons at Concordia Hospital in Winnipeg are partnering with Selkirk “to make sure the people who are most appropriate to be done can be done in a very timely fashion,” Buchel said.

More than 70 per cent of hip and knee replacements are done on an outpatient basis, allowing patients to recover at home while freeing up hospital capacity for additional surgeries, he said.

“As we get a more co-ordinated approach, we can move patients where we have the capacity.”

The partnership between Concordia surgeons and the Selkirk hospital is a “prime example” of how Manitoba is “provincializing” surgical care, Buchel said.

The goal is that by 2030, no patient in Manitoba will wait outside of the targeted six months, he said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca