Balancing health-care hopes with realism

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This article was published 26/12/2023 (674 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Well that didn’t take long.

Already, some NDP faithful within the leadership at Manitoba Nurses Union is disappointed in their new government. I don’t say this gloatingly, either. But after hearing numerous constituents during the last provincial election repeat the union mantra that the state of health care was ‘outRAGEous’ under a Tory government and that everyone should “vote like your life depends on it,” it was interesting to see the union’s latest missive, stating, “new government, same problems.”

This was sent out in a post on X last week along with the sounding of alarm bells that the Health Sciences Centre ER is “drowning,” wait times were 30-plus hours, and patients were being moved to unmonitored hallways to make room for more critical patients.

Sure, the Tory government ruined health care during the previous seven years, some say, and it will take the NDP years to clean up the mess. Fair enough. Except that I also got elected in 2016 under a Tory banner in part because of a broken health-care system caused by the NDP. ER wait times were often 30-plus hours, nurses were experiencing unprecedented burnout, health-care facilities were crumbling and in need of significant capital upgrades, and surgical wait times were highly problematic. Constituents wanted improvements and for that reason, plus many more, they voted us in.

There is a cycle in this province of flipping between Tory and NDP governments based on the level of dissatisfaction voters feel in regard to the state of health care, and to a certain extent, the level of politicization it receives.

Unfortunately the health-care improvements voters were looking for when they chose us were never realized, and I’d be the last to argue that my former Tory government made any strides in shortening wait times for service or improving working conditions for the front lines. Between early cuts co-ordinated with a rushed consolidation, and then an unfortunately timed pandemic, things worsened. I wasn’t surprised when voters showed us the door in October, just as I was not surprised by the force with which the unions came out against us to ensure defeat. Despite having pumped millions into a health human resources action plan, initiating a $1.2-billion capital plan, and investing a record $7.9 billion into the health-care system during our last year in government, people said it was too little, too late. They were angry and wanted change.

The NDP took office with an impressive majority largely on a promise to fix health care. This includes reinstating emergency rooms at three hospitals in Winnipeg, hiring 400 more physicians across the province and 300 new nurses in Winnipeg, and adding 100 new home-care workers, to name a few.

I hope they are successful. I hope they become the government to break the cycle once and for all of getting voted in, and subsequently voted out, based on people’s level of dissatisfaction with health care.

Yet I’m also a realist, and I know many of you are, too.

“I worked in health care for four decades before retiring, and the more things changed, the more they stayed the same,” said one nurse I chatted with at the doors in Riel during the last election in regards to the heightened politicization of health care. She told me the current NDP promises to fix health care were implausible, just as she said it was no one particular government’s responsibility for breaking health care in the first place.

I appreciated this perspective, although it was among the minority. More often than not, people said it was our government that ruined health care, they were switching back to the NDP, and intending to “vote like their life depended upon it.”

I couldn’t argue with any of that. Health care is the most difficult and complex file in government and I count my lucky stars I never had it under my purview. I have yet to hear a health minister of any stripe at either the federal or provincial level say they weathered the storm well.

While I’m apt to side with my former constituent who believed that healing (and breaking) health care is larger than any one government can claim — especially in our climate of growing demands on the system with an aging population, widescale retirements, and nationwide shortages of human resources — I question the wisdom behind highly politicizing health care in the first place. Intense campaigns such as the ones we saw in the last election encourages embellishment, which may ultimately lead to another round of unmet promises.

This is unfortunate, because as the nurses’ union also posted on X during the last election, “broken promises only further erode trust.”

And so the cycle continues.

Rochelle Squires is a recovering politician after serving 7 1/2 years in the Manitoba legislature. She is a political and social commentator whose column appears Tuesdays.

rochelle@rochellesquires.ca