Health system must be as accountable as the rest of us

If the government catches you fishing without a licence you could receive a $298 fine. Similarly, you’ll face a $143 fine if you haven’t updated the address on your driver’s licence after moving. These are just a couple examples of the various fines Manitobans face for relatively small mistakes.

So what happened when the government’s health system accidentally let patient Debbie Fewster die on a waitlist? There were no consequences, according to a freedom of information response from Shared Health. It seems the government doesn’t want to hold itself accountable for colossal mistakes.

The Niverville patient was told in 2024 that she needed heart surgery within three weeks but died on a waiting list after waiting more than two months. After we helped bring her story to light a year ago, Debbie’s children have since learned their mother died because the system accidentally put her case in the long-term pile instead of the urgent pile.

Compare this with a Manitoba business that faced a $70,000 fine last year when an employee died on the job. The year prior a different business faced $23,000 in penalties for an accident that saw an employee lose a finger. These are serious consequences for serious incidents.

One has to wonder why the health system is exempt.

No amount of money will bring Debbie Fewster back to life. The goal is not to skewer government employees either. But if the government believes in fines and consequences for everyone else, then surely its own major mistakes should be subject to some kind of penalty.

When SecondStreet.org helped the Fewsters bring their mother’s story to light last year we put forward an idea that all political parties should be able to get behind: Debbie’s Law.

The idea would require health providers to give patients, who are waiting for lifesaving treatment, two pieces of information: their estimated wait time and the maximum recommended wait time. This would allow patients to know if the system was putting their life at risk or not due to a long wait time. In some cases, patients might decide to save their life by pursuing lifesaving treatment abroad. The proposed policy would also have caught the human error in Debbie’s case.

This approach would bring the health system in line with what governments impose on the rest of society: automakers are required to inform the public if they discover a safety problem with one of their vehicles, food distributors are required to inform the public if they discover E. coli on lettuce they’ve sold, etc. A Leger poll shows 86 per cent of Canadians believe the health system should have to notify the public if wait times are putting lives at risk. This idea is not ideological, it’s grounded in transparency.

After we at SecondStreet.org brought Debbie’s story to light, the government floated a policy directive last April that would ask cardiac surgical providers to inform patients with information about their wait times. It wasn’t a legal requirement and included no consequences, but we, along with the Fewsters, held a news conference to note it was a step in the right direction. Since that time, we’ve discovered no one hit “send” on that directive. The government claims the directive was given verbally and it has been implemented. That’s an unserious response to a very serious matter.

Did the government issue a verbal directive to the public decades ago to tell everyone to purchase a fishing licence before fishing? No, they put the requirement in law along with fines for failing to comply.

The directive is also not being followed. St. Boniface Hospital now provides patients with letters about their situation — that’s positive. But the letters only provide one figure, a broad surgical target time, instead of also including the maximum recommended wait time. Patients need both pieces of information to know if their life is at risk or if it looks like the government will provide surgery in time.

It’s strange that such a straightforward idea hasn’t been implemented yet — it’s not exactly rocket science. If the government expects others to be accountable and transparent, that standard should also be required for the health system.

Colin Craig is the president of SecondStreet.org, a Canadian think tank.