Reduction in wait times shows province’s initiatives paying off

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This article was published 01/11/2024 (362 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Emergency room and urgent care wait times — key measurements of hospital overcrowding — are improving as it appears the Kinew government is making progress on one of its key election promises.

ER and urgent care wait times in Winnipeg fell — albeit very slightly — for the third month in a row in September, according to new data released Thursday by the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.

And for the first time since the NDP won government just over a year ago, ER and urgent care wait times are down from the same month a year earlier.

The median wait time for all Winnipeg hospitals in September was 3.32 hours, largely unchanged from the previous month but still slightly below what it was in August at 3.35 hours.

It was 3.43 hours in September 2023, the last full month the former Progressive Conservative government was in power.

The 90th percentile wait (the longest wait for nine of 10 patients) for ERs and urgent care centres in September was 8.82 hours, down from 9.28 hours in August. It was 9.82 in September 2023.

Wait times are now lower than they were under the previous government.

Median wait times peaked in December 2023 (less than two months after the NDP was sworn into office) at four hours. They have been declining steadily ever since, including through last winter’s respiratory illness season, which is no easy feat.

ER and urgent care wait times are still far too long and remain much longer than they were prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, when they hovered slightly above two hours.

And there are still problem areas. Grace Hospital, for example, saw its ER wait time jump to 5.38 hours in September, up from 4.92 in August and higher than the same month a year earlier. Health Sciences Centre’s ER wait time also increased slightly in September compared with the previous month, although it’s lower than it was for the same month a year earlier.

The NDP government has taken several steps to reduce hospital congestion, including announcing more staffed hospital beds earlier this year. The province says it has increased its net complement of front-line health care workers and introduced weekend discharge protocols to speed up patient flow through hospitals in order to free up beds sooner.

Those measures appear to be having a positive impact.

The WRHA’s 2023-24 annual report released last week shows the number of staffed hospital beds in Winnipeg was unchanged last year from the previous two years, despite a growing and aging population. That is one of the main reasons hospitals have become more congested and why ER wait times have grown.

The additional health-care staff and new beds in the last several months appear to be turning that around, although only marginally.

The true test will be this winter when respiratory illnesses, including influenza and COVID-19, flare up and ERs are filled with more patients. If hospitals can get through that season without higher ER and urgent care wait times, it would be a significant accomplishment.

Hospitals still don’t have the capacity to meet the growing demand for medical services in Manitoba. Wait times for surgery and diagnostic testing, such as CT scans and MRIs, continue to grow (although changes to how surgeries are booked through a new centralized system may be artificially inflating surgical wait time numbers).

More staffed beds are still required and the province needs to do a better job of transferring long-term patients out of hospitals and into alternative placements.

Still, wait times are an important gauge of hospital overcrowding because that’s where the bottlenecks occur when admitted patients have to wait sometimes days for a bed.

It is not the only measurement, but it’s probably the most important one. It’s the most visible to the public.

Meanwhile, the biggest improvement in ERs is at St. Boniface Hospital, where patient overcrowding has been particularly bad in recent years. The median ER wait time there was 4.07 hours in September, down from 4.57 hours in August and 4.98 in September 2023. The 90th percentile wait has fallen dramatically to 8.88 hours in September, down from 11.70 hours the same month a year earlier.

It’s early days but Manitobans are beginning to see some progress on reducing wait times. The province will have to continue to recruit more front-line workers and open more beds to keep that momentum going.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca