NDP should explain Shared Health’s value to Manitobans waiting for promised ‘fix’

Eight years after Shared Health was created, the revolving door in its executive ranks should prompt a more fundamental question than who gets the next job.

The real question should be: why does Shared Health exist at all?

The provincial health authority has been plagued by an exodus of senior executives in recent years, including CEOs, vice-presidents and chief financial officers. It’s now looking for its fourth CFO since 2023.

There may be perfectly reasonable explanations for the departures.

But when an organization created to provide stability, co-ordination and provincewide planning is repeatedly losing senior leaders, it’s reasonable to wonder whether there’s a larger problem.

Perhaps the larger problem isn’t the turnover. Perhaps it’s the organization itself.

Shared Health was created by the former Progressive Conservative government in 2018 to oversee provincial planning, health services and operational support.

Eight years later, government should be able to answer a pretty basic question: how has this added layer of bureaucracy improved patient care?

Manitoba’s health-care system already had three layers of bureaucracy before Shared Health was created: Manitoba Health, regional health authorities and hospital administrations. Shared Health became the fourth.

So, what did Manitobans get for it? It seems to be an increasingly difficult question to answer.

If Shared Health has made the system more efficient, more accountable or better integrated, Manitobans should be able to see the evidence.

But where is it?

Emergency-room wait times are at an all-time high. Surgical and diagnostic wait lists remain too long and continue to grow, in some areas. Health-care workers are still reporting burnout and exhaustion.

Hospitals remain clogged with patients who no longer need acute care but have nowhere else to go. And there’s still a woeful lack of capacity in community care services, including personal care homes, home care and supportive housing.

Meanwhile, Manitoba faces a growing demographic challenge as its population ages and patients show up at ERs with increasingly complicated medical needs.

Where is the provincewide, long-term planning that was supposed to be one of Shared Health’s major selling points?

This isn’t to suggest that the people working at Shared Health aren’t doing important work. They are. The issue is whether that work requires another layer of administration.

The NDP government should be making the case for why taxpayers are still paying for this expensive bureaucracy. They didn’t create Shared Health, but by keeping it, they are endorsing its existence.

Premier Wab Kinew has said his government cut eight per cent of Shared Health’s senior management during its first year in office and redirected resources toward front-line care.

That may be.

But cutting some managers isn’t the same as questioning the structure that requires those managers in the first place.

It’s clear the current government believes Shared Health has a legitimate role to play in the system, or it would have dissolved it by now. As a result, it should explain to Manitobans why this added layer of bureaucracy is so important and how it benefits patients.

If taxpayers are getting good value for their money from this organization, it’s incumbent upon the provincial government to explain how.

There is more money going into health care. There are more people in the system; the government says it has added 4,725 net new health-care workers since the 2023 election. And the 2026-27 budget projects almost $1 billion more for Manitoba Health, Seniors and Long-Term Care.

Those are significant investments. But the basic structure of the system remains remarkably similar to what it’s been for the past eight years. And many of the key health-care indicators are getting worse.

The NDP has had nearly three years to decide what to do with Shared Health and it has chosen to keep it.

Fine. Then it should defend it.

It should tell Manitobans what this extra layer of bureaucracy does that Manitoba Health, regional health authorities and hospital administrations could not do prior to 2018.

If the province can’t make that case, perhaps the question isn’t how to make Shared Health work better. Perhaps the question is why taxpayers are still paying for something nobody has convincingly demonstrated it needs.

Health-care reform shouldn’t be about preserving institutions because they have been around long enough to become permanent. It should be about getting patients the care they need.

If Shared Health helps do that, then government should prove it.

If it doesn’t, it’s time to stop treating its existence as inevitable.