Little progress on hospital wait times after year of NDP government

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/12/2024 (272 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The good news is hospital emergency-room and urgent-care wait times in Winnipeg are down slightly, exactly one year after the NDP won last year’s provincial election. The bad news is wait times have grown at three of the city’s six hospitals during that time.

The NDP pledged during 2023 election campaign to reduce ER wait times by adding more staff and beds to the system. One year later, wait times have dropped a bit, but not much.

The median wait for Winnipeg’s three ERs and three urgent care centres was 3.52 hours in October 2023, the month the NDP was sworn into office. That dropped marginally to 3.43 hours in October of this year. It’s not much of an improvement.

The median wait time is the point at which half of patients had shorter wait times and half had longer ones.

The biggest improvement during the NDP’s first year in office was at Concordia Hospital’s urgent-care centre, where the median wait time dropped from 4.4 hours to 3.63 hours. It’s still far too long and much longer than it was prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is an improvement.

The ER wait time at Health Sciences Centre is also down slightly from 3.66 hours to 3.53 hours over the past year, while Seven Oaks urgent care saw a slight decline from 3.97 hours to 3.63 hours.

However, wait times at Winnipeg’s three other hospitals have grown since October 2023.

The longest ER wait times continue to be at St. Boniface Hospital, where the median wait time has grown to a staggering 6.2 hours from 5.45 hours in October 2023.

The bottleneck at St. B’s ER is a serious problem that should be drawing the attention of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and the provincial government. It’s a disaster; half of people arriving at the ER are waiting more than six hours to see a doctor. The longest wait time for nine of 10 ER patients (called the 90th percentile wait time) was 13.9 hours at the facility, up slightly from 13.6 hours in October 2023.

It’s not that more people are showing up at the ER for care. In fact, the total number of St. Boniface ER visits fell almost every year — from 46,920 in 2019-20 to 39,405 in 2023-24 — according to the WRHA’s latest annual report.

Even the number of patients sick enough to be admitted to hospital dropped during that period from 9,715 to 8,928. What did grow dramatically is the number of people who arrived at the St. Boniface ER but left without being seen by a doctor. That has more than doubled from 3,130 in 2019-20 to 7,025 in 2023-24.

It’s unclear why ER wait times at St. Boniface have grown so much, considering patient volumes are down. The number of staffed beds at the hospital is unchanged at 464 over the past three years. However, bed occupancy has hit its highest point in five years at 94.4 per cent.

It could be the hospital is seeing more acutely ill patients and/or is treating more long-term patients who should be cared for in a non-hospital setting. It may also be due to staffing shortages.

Either way, this should be examined a lot more closely. A 6.2-hour median wait time is unacceptable.

Grace Hospital is another problem facility. Its ER wait time is largely unchanged from a year ago at 5.67 hours (it was 5.6 hours in October 2023). Despite an announcement earlier this year by the NDP government to fund more beds at the facility, there has been no improvement in ER wait times there. And much like St. Boniface Hospital, ER visits at Grace are down over the past five years, as are the number of admitted patients.

Overall, the number of ER and urgent-care visits at Winnipeg hospitals (excluding Health Sciences Centre, which reports its numbers separately through Shared Health) is down compared with pre-pandemic volumes (180,108 in 2023-24 versus 199,066 in 2019-20), as are the number of admitted patients (19,240 in 2023-24 compared to 21,925 in 2019-20).

HSC has seen its ER visits decline from 118,590 in 2019-20 to 103,997 in 2023-24, while its staffed bed count increased only marginally from 773 to 781 during that period.

Whatever the case, ER and urgent-care wait times at Winnipeg hospitals are still far too long and much longer than they were pre-pandemic.

No one said a new government could fix this problem overnight. But so far, after a year in office, the NDP has made little progress.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca