Health-care ‘frustration’ keeps Manitoba nurse away

A former Manitoba nurse working in Minnesota says despite political turmoil she won’t return home to practise due to the state of the province’s health-care system.

Rebecca Schneider has considered moving back to Manitoba since November 2024, when Donald Trump was re-elected.

As the U.S. has stepped up immigration enforcement raids to seek out undocumented immigrants, Schneider said she feels unsafe in her own city.

“I have felt more unsafe in the last month with all the (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) activity in Minneapolis than I ever felt during COVID, during the riots with George Floyd’s incident in 2020,” she told the Free Press, referencing the Black man murdered by a white police officer. “There’s areas of the city you just can’t go anymore.”

Schneider is considered a non-citizen; she moved to Minneapolis in 2014 to be with her American husband and holds the status of permanent resident. The ICU nurse sticks close to home and doesn’t go out unless necessary.

Despite the uneasiness, she says the NDP government’s mishandling of staffing in the health-care system has stopped her from returning to a Winnipeg hospital.

Schneider, who worked at the Health Sciences Centre between 2009 and 2014 said workloads were not at a completely sustainable level then, but they were far better than what she hears they are today.

“At HSC, the expectation was that I was going to have six high-acuity, post-surgical patients for the entirety of my 12-hour shift. Here, you would have four medium-acuity patients,” Schneider said. “My job is not an issue.”

The nurse liked working at HSC for its room for advancement and education, but current staffing issues facing Manitoba hospitals has made her look elsewhere in Canada.

Premier Wab Kinew and Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara have flown the “mission accomplished” banner before nurses feel like they have a grip on their workload, Schneider said.

In an effort to address issues in hospitals, the province opened its health care retention and recruitment office in May 2024. Efforts were ramped up to recruit American doctors after Trump was again elected.

Those efforts have attracted 22 nurses and 13 doctors to Manitoba thus far. Five nurses are actively working in hospitals across the province.

“It’s just a cart-before-the-horse thing and it’s not winning them any points,” she said. “I’m not sure that right now, after everything, that I want to get back into feeling that kind of frustration every time I step foot into work.”

In an emailed statement, Asagwara said the province’s priority remains supporting front-line staff and ensuring residents receive “safe, timely care.”

“We know health-care professionals carefully consider where they choose to practise, and our focus is on building a system where both patients and providers feel supported,” the statement said.

St. Boniface Hospital is currently facing a grey-list vote, a union tactic that would see nurses discourage their colleagues from working at the facility owing to unresolved staffing and safety issues.

If St. Boniface is grey-listed, it would become the third Manitoba hospital with the union distinction, joining HSC and Thompson General Hospital.

Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson was discouraged to hear the nurse’s outlook on health-care in Manitoba and says the union is trying to address concerns.

The union was part of a recruitment and retention committee struck by the province to address chronic staffing shortages. A document with recommendations is on the minister’s desk and the committee is due to meet with Asagwara in the coming weeks.

The union is advocating for minimum nurse-to-patient ratios.

“When you know you’re going to work and you’re going to have a reasonable patient load, and you know you’re going to get to go home at the end of your shift, that is huge for recruitment and retention,” Jackson said.

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The union has looked to provinces like B.C. for guidance. The West Coast province is seen by many in the field as having the “gold standard” of one nurse to three patients in most emergency departments. In critical care settings, the ratio is one-to-one, and one-to-four in medical and surgical units.

If, and when, Manitoba implements its own minimum standards, Jackson said the system will see fewer critical incidents and more nurses looking to Manitoba for work.

Schneider knows the situation in Minneapolis can’t go on forever, but if it lingers, she’ll be looking north to provinces like B.C. or Alberta.

“Nurses just seem to be a bigger priority in those places,” she said.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca

Nicole Buffie
Multimedia producer

Nicole Buffie is a reporter for the Free Press city desk. Born and bred in Winnipeg, Nicole graduated from Red River College’s Creative Communications program in 2020 and worked as a reporter throughout Manitoba before joining the Free Press newsroom as a multimedia producer in 2023. Read more about Nicole.

Every piece of reporting Nicole produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.