Shelved health-care analysis needs resolution

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/05/2023 (861 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Considering staff retention and recruitment are by far the most important challenges facing Manitoba’s beleaguered health-care system, it’s astonishing an independent analysis has been shelved by government.

Manitoba Health commissioned consulting firm Deloitte to assess the resiliency and well-being of health-care workers in the province. The company consulted a wide range of front-line workers through questionnaires, interviews and focus groups to identify workplace problems and provide government with recommendations on how to improve working conditions.

Deloitte completed Phase 1 of the evaluation last year, and was to do a deeper dive in a Phase 2 assessment. The plan was to do more focus groups and interviews with health-care staff.

The goal: to provide government with better insight into workplace issues so the province could develop more effective retention and recruitment strategies.

Then something happened. The project was cancelled last summer, and the Phase 1 report was shelved. The report, which has been collecting dust since, didn’t come to light until last week, when opposition parties made it available in the legislature.

“During the development of this reporting, it was assumed there was a second phase (Focused Investment in Employee Resilience), which would validate the trends and observations seen in Phase 1 and allow for deeper analysis by employee segment for each service delivery organization (SDO) and government department in scope,” the report says. “As of July 2022, there are no plans to continue the assessment in Phase 2.”

Why did government nix this much-needed evaluation process?

As usual, the Stefanson government won’t say.

Health Minister Audrey Gordon would only say her office wasn’t aware of the report, even though it was commissioned for internal use by Manitoba Health. Either she’s not telling the truth or she is hopelessly ignorant of what is going on in her own department.

Almost every problem in health care today boils down to staff shortages.

Long wait times in emergency departments are caused mostly by a shortage of staffed beds on medical wards. Admitted patients in ERs are waiting days in gurneys in hallways because there aren’t enough staff on medical wards to care for them.

Long wait lists for surgical procedures, such as hip and knee replacements and cataracts, are caused primarily by a lack of support staff, mainly nurses. Many surgeons say they could immediately perform more surgeries if they had more support staff.

What the 51-page report shows is heavy workloads, staff shortages, wage freezes and a lack of input into policy changes are causing staff to quit or consider resigning.

It also shows many of these problems existed before the COVID-19 pandemic and are worse in Manitoba than in other parts of the country. Those are significant findings.

One would think the Stefanson government would be interested in examining them further to help find solutions to workplace challenges. Instead, the entire process was cancelled and the report buried.

One of the key findings in the draft document is front-line staff have little faith in the province’s ability to manage change. It speaks to the top-down approach of the current government in how it has reformed health care, including consolidating acute care hospitals and closing ERs without properly consulting the people who work in them.

“Many employees feel their leaders and managers are out of touch with the nature of their unit’s work, to the point where processes changes can be paradoxical and inefficient,” the report says.

Instead of following through with an in-depth analysis of workplace issues, the Stefanson government last year announced a health-care recruitment and retention initiative, with no targets and almost no detail. It was largely a political stunt designed to convince the public government is doing something to solve the staffing crisis.

Gordon needs to explain to the public why the Deloitte process was cancelled and what the province plans to put in its place (and why she claims she hasn’t even read the report).

Government can’t effectively recruit and retain health-care staff if it doesn’t know what the problems are in the workplace.

Willful blindness is not an effective strategy to solve this problem.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca