A long, difficult walk for care

Opinion

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This article was published 18/10/2023 (726 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The distance between Winnipeg’s former Health Sciences Centre (HSC) cardiology clinic and the lab that does heart tracings, or ECGs, is a less-than-one-minute stroll of 25 steps. That was good news for those suffering from shortness of breath or chest pain brought on by walking. But now heart patients have to walk nearly a kilometre from the relocated cardiology clinic at 700 Elgin Ave. to get their ECGs at HSC.

In April 2022, the cardiology clinic, along with many other medical specialty clinics, was moved to the former Ellen Douglass School building at 700 Elgin.

This is a big deal because “100 per cent of my patients require an ECG,” says Dr. Ivan Barac, one of the relocated cardiologists.

The plan to relocate HSC-based medical clinics to the Elgin site was announced in 2017; renovations began in 2020. The estimated cost of the project was more than $16 million. The Manitoba government said in a news release on April 6, 2022, that it estimated that more than 100,000 patients would use the clinic every year.

But after spending millions of dollars and taking years to plan, there are no ECG, blood collection or X-ray services at 700 Elgin.

This is bad news for patients suffering from heart disease, arthritis or other ailments requiring ECGs, blood work or X-rays.

I took the shortest, and perhaps not the safest, route between 700 Elgin and the HSC ECG lab. I walked along the east side of the new clinic location and then between the HSC William Avenue parkade and the Harry Medovy building, which brought me to the crosswalk to the HSC William entrance. It took more than 450 steps. According to Google, using a safer route along Sherbrook Street en route to William Avenue was about 900 metres or a four-and-a-half city block walk that takes about 12 minutes.

Early in the planning process, Coun. Vivian Santos (Point Douglas) voiced safety concerns about dimly lit passageways between 700 Elgin and HSC. I reached out to her office to see if she still had concerns, but no response was received by publication.

When asked about safety concerns for patients walking between the Elgin clinic and HSC, a Shared Health spokesperson responded by email: “Several surveillance cameras and additional lighting have been installed in the vicinity of the clinic, which is only open to patients during the day.”

The plan to move the clinic aimed to improve patient care by combining at least 12 medical specialists in one clinic. “Manitoba is investing in the care patients need while making services easier for them to access,” former health minister Audrey Gordon said in a 2022 government news release.

I agree that there are merits, especially for patients with complex health issues, to have so many specialists in one location.

But, once again, Shared Health failed to attend to small, but important, details. ECG, blood collection and X-ray services are essential tools that doctors use daily to manage their patients and they should be available at the Elgin clinic.

My cardiology colleagues were gobsmacked when they took their first tour of the Elgin clinic and were told that on-site ECG services were not yet available but would be available at some unspecified time in the future.

Expecting patients to make the trek between the Elgin clinic and HSC is not only inconvenient but not physically possible for some patients because of chest pain, shortness of breath or joints that cannot tolerate the nearly one-kilometre walk.

When will ECG and blood collection services be available at the Elgin clinic?

Blood collection and ECG services are expected to be available at the Elgin clinic in 2024, according to an email from a Shared Health spokesperson.

When the Manitoba government created Shared Health, it promised a “new provincial health organization with a focus on patient-centred planning.”

What part of taking more than two years to provide essential on-site health services, such as ECG and blood collection, for more than 100,000 patients, is “patients first”?

These services are not complicated to arrange and they should have been in place from day one.

Perhaps Shared Health was unwilling to pony up the needed resources for these services, despite the millions it had already spent to renovate the Elgin clinic, or perhaps this is yet another example of Shared Health’s inability to get its ducks in a row when it comes to rolling out its health services.

Either way, patients deserve better and I hope they do not have to wait too long before these essential services are available on-site at the Elgin clinic.

Dr. Sandor Demeter is a Winnipeg physician, an associate professor in the department of community health sciences at the University of Manitoba and a graduate of the Dalla Lana School of Public Health Global Journalism program at the University of Toronto.