Long road to recovery: ER, urgent care wait times return to disastrous levels

Opinion

Emergency room wait times in Winnipeg have quietly climbed back to record levels.

It hasn’t received much attention amid Canada’s trade war with the United States and the daily headlines from the federal election.

But the median wait time for ERs and urgent care centres in Winnipeg jumped to 3.97 hours in February, essentially matching the record level of four hours set in December 2023.

Whatever Manitoba’s NDP government says it’s doing to reduce ER wait times is not working.

Wait times at all three Winnipeg acute care hospitals were higher in February than they were the previous month and higher than they were in February 2024, according to the most recent data from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.

Grace Hospital saw the largest year over year jump, climbing to a median wait time of 5.85 hours in February from 4.02 hours in February 2024.

The median wait time is the point at which half of patients wait longer and half wait less. Many patients wait far longer than the median wait time. The WRHA posts it online to track progress or worsening conditions over time.

The situation is equally disastrous at St. Boniface Hospital, where ER wait times reached 5.95 hours in February, compared to 3.88 hours the same month in 2024.

At Health Sciences Centre, Manitoba’s largest hospital, ER wait times are also up, despite claims earlier this year by senior officials there that emergency room congestion was improving.

HSC’s median wait time rose to 3.57 hours in February from 3.15 the previous month and 3.45 in February 2024.

In some cases, long wait times are having deadly consequences. A 49-year-old man died at HSC’s ER in January after a prolonged wait. Chad Giffin arrived at the ER just after midnight on Jan. 7.

About eight hours later, he was unresponsive and staff attempted to resuscitate him, to no avail. Giffin was pronounced dead. His tragic death triggered a critical incident review.

Meanwhile, urgent care wait times at Concordia Hospital and Seven Oaks Hospital are down slightly compared with the same month in 2024. But the numbers are up at Victoria Hospitals urgent care centre.

For all ERs and urgent care centres combined in Winnipeg, the median wait time in February was 3.97 hours.

So what about the hundreds of hospital staff the NDP claims to have hired to help alleviate ER congestion?

The only way to reduce ER wait times is to add more staffed beds on medical wards so admitted patients don’t languish in emergency departments, including in hallways, sometimes for days.

Also, more needs to be done to reduce “access block,” including by speeding up what physicians call “patient flow” through hospitals. That includes opening more personal care home beds and transitional beds to transfer long-term hospital patients to more appropriate facilities, thereby freeing up spots on medical wards.

According to the 2025 Manitoba budget unveiled last month, the province has hired 1,255 net new front-line workers in health care across the province, including doctors and nurses.

The NDP says it has added 233 fully staffed beds to hospitals across the province.

Budget 2025 provides $47 million in funding to open 97 new fully staffed beds in the health-care system. That includes 60 acute care beds, 10 new critical care beds and 27 new transitional care beds. However, it’s unclear when those beds will open. It’s contingent on hiring more front-line workers.

Whatever the case, after a year and a half in government, Premier Wab Kinew and the NDP haven’t moved the needle one iota when it comes to reducing ER wait times. They’re just as bad today, if not worse, than when the NDP was sworn into office in October 2023.

And if the system doesn’t improve soon, there could be more ER deaths and substandard care as admitted patients continue to be warehoused in emergency room departments.

Just to put today’s numbers into context, ER wait times have more than doubled over the past eight years, mostly under the previous Progressive Conservative government. They were well below two hours in 2017 and 2018.

After the Tories consolidated hospital operations in Winnipeg, including closing beds, reducing staff and converting three ERs to urgent care centres, ER and urgent care wait times climbed above two hours.

They fell below two hours briefly during the COVID-19 pandemic, but increased again, hitting three hours for the first time in September 2022. They rose further and peaked at four hours in December 2023, two months after the NDP won government.

No one expects the NDP to bring ER wait times back below two hours overnight. But the fact the Kinew government has made no progress whatsoever on bringing them down after nearly a year and half in government is troubling.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca