‘No plans to cancel nurse vacations’: Manitoba health minister

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This article was published 05/04/2022 (1513 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba Health Minister Audrey Gordon said her government is not taking away nurses’ vacation time to staff more surgical slates, as the province tries to pick away at a backlog of postponed operations.

“We have no plans to cancel nurse vacations,” Gordon said during question period Tuesday, after being grilled by NDP health critic Uzoma Asagwara.

The Manitoba Nurses Union said while the employer hasn’t outright cancelled summer vacations, it is hearing from members fewer nurses will be permitted to take time off.

“After a very long and difficult two years, this request has been yet one more blow to morale,” MNU president Darlene Jackson said Tuesday.

“The assurance from the minister of health is less than reassuring for Manitoba nurses who have borne the brunt of poor pandemic planning. In fact, they’ve heard this rhetoric on repeat over the past two years and have run out of faith.”

The health minister told reporters in a scrum Shared Health has worked with each site to increase the surgical slates completed in coming months.

“It’s based on the projections of the staff who will be available this summer,” said Gordon. “Those plans are in place, and will result in approximately 200 additional surgical slates being completed this summer.”

Gordon then thanked “those who’ve come forward and very willingly stated they want to help Manitobans receive their surgeries over the summer. It will result in more people getting their surgery and not having to suffer in pain.”

Last week, the health minister said the province plans to run surgical slates at 75 to 100 per cent capacity through the summer months in order to catch up on thousands of operations that were delayed owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Surgical volumes typically drop to about 40 per cent through the summer, as part of scheduled slowdowns to accommodate vacation time for surgeons, nurses and other health-care staff.

Shared Health said Tuesday in order to support this increased level of activity, changes were made to vacation scheduling for health-care workers in the surgery programs relating to the number of individuals who can be off on vacation at the same time.

“To be clear, no vacations have been cancelled and the amount of available vacation for staff remains the same over the course of the year,” Shared Health said in a statement.

The change results in the number of staff who can schedule vacations at any one time more evenly distributed across the entire year, it said.

It also brings surgical unit vacation planning into alignment with other areas of the health system, such as emergency, critical care, medical wards, various clinics and dialysis, Shared Health said.

Meantime, Asagwara said nurses shouldn’t be asked to give up summer vacation time.

“We know that nurses — many of which are burned out — are being asked to give up time with their families, to give up their vacations,” the former nurse told reporters in a scrum.

“The minister has had an abundance of time to plan appropriately and invest in health care and staffing to make sure that exhausted nurses who’ve been working flat-out for two years during this pandemic can finally take a break.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca