Private clinic expands to cut wait times

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This article was published 10/11/2011 (5259 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A private, for-profit medical clinic has more than doubled its surgical space in a move to handle even more patients funnelled their way by Manitoba Health.

The Western Surgery Centre has moved from the downtown to south Winnipeg, where it hopes to perform more cataract and other minor surgical procedures to further reduce wait times in the province’s health-care system.

“What we’re wanting to do with our expansion is say, ‘Hey, we can do so much more than we’re doing,’ ” manager Craig Donnelly said Tuesday.

“I think we do about 1,500 cataracts a year. I think we can do about 3,000 very easily.”

Western Surgery opened for business in the city about 25 years ago and over time has taken on more patients under its Manitoba Health contracts. The company also performs privately paid elective cosmetic and dental surgery. In the past the NDP government has threatened to limit the number of publicly funded patients referred to the centre, but the opposite has happened.

Donnelly said the centre can also treat some patients sent by the city’s busy emergency rooms.

“There’s a lot of pressure on the ERs these days to send people home, kind of like the walking wounded because there’s no operating room space,” he said. “They’ll bandage them up and send them home. We can take those cases.”

The centre is by law limited to performing plastic surgeries and other day surgeries, and can’t keep patients overnight.

The Progressive Conservative party has said in the past that the NDP have never fully examined the potential benefits of private health-care providers to the health system because of out-of-date ideological thinking.

“They’re worried about the ‘private’ implications despite the case the majority of our revenue right now is derived from Manitoba Health,” Donnelly said of the NDP.

“Where the challenge is, in a public system they really don’t have a strong grasp of what the true cost is of a particular procedure. We know we can do things more effectively and efficiently here.”

“We’ve met with Manitoba Health and given them a tour of our new facility and it became pretty clear to them that we could do more than we’re doing,” Donnelly said. “We’re hoping that they loosen the purse strings and allocate more in the budget to us so we can do more to alleviate some of the strains.”

The official opening of the new surgical centre at 1020 Lorimer Blvd. is Nov. 24.

bruce.owen@freepress.mb.ca