Grace expansion feels like pre-election ploy By: Editorial Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Wednesday, May. 3, 2023

Opinion

Premier Heather Stefanson made a curious announcement this past weekend. The premier pledged on Sunday that her government plans to triple the size of Grace Hospital’s intensive-care unit.

Construction on the project is expected to begin in the summer of 2024, the premier announced. However, there is no completion date, or even a rough estimate of when the new ICU beds might come online. The province has allocated $30 million to the project (along with a contribution of $5 million from the Grace Hospital Foundation), but there is no overall budget for construction costs.

The hospital released no drawings or design work for the proposed renovation, which is supposed to include up to 20 additional ICU beds (on top of the current 10). When Ms. Stefanson was asked how the hospital plans to staff the expanded unit — the most important part of the project — the premier did not know.

Without those details, or evidence that any real planning went into this proposed expansion, Ms. Stefanson’s announcement offers little hope that chronic overcrowding at the hospital will ease any time soon. It was more wishful thinking than a concrete plan to improve patient care.

Like most health facilities in Winnipeg, Grace Hospital is suffering from a severe shortage of front-line workers. That shortage worsened after the PC government consolidated acute care hospitals between 2017 and 2019, causing many staff to resign or retire early.

During consolidation, intensive care capacity at Winnipeg hospitals was reduced from 73 ICU beds to 63. It was one of the main reasons health officials were forced to airlift 57 critically ill patients to other provinces in 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The reduced ICU capacity was a severe blow to Winnipeg’s hospital system.

When consolidation was announced in 2017, the province said there would be no overall decline in hospital capacity. The stated goal was to consolidate acute care services at three facilities, down from the previous six, to better utilize existing resources and reduce patient transfers between hospitals. However, once the changes were complete, there were fewer hospital beds in the system.

When consolidation was announced in 2017, the province said there would be no overall decline in hospital capacity… However, once the changes were complete, there were fewer hospital beds in the system.

Grace Hospital was one of three sites chosen to retain acute care status. While its ICU grew slightly from eight beds to 10 in 2018, it has remained at that number for the past five years, despite a growing and aging population. Meanwhile, between 2017-18 and 2021-22, the total number of staffed hospital beds at Grace Hospital has declined from 235 to 227.

Given the staff shortages and the reduced capacity, it’s no surprise that a group of orthopedic surgeons at Grace wrote a letter last fall to Health Minister Audrey Gordon warning that the facility is unable to provide patients with an acceptable level of care. The median wait time at the hospital’s emergency department has more than doubled from 1.5 hours in 2017 to 3.6 hours in March, owing in large part to a shortage of staffed medical beds.

The median wait time at the hospital’s emergency department has more than doubled from 1.5 hours in 2017 to 3.6 hours in March, owing in large part to a shortage of staffed medical beds.

Now, five months before a scheduled provincial election, Ms. Stefanson says she plans to increase ICU capacity at the Grace. She does so without providing any evidence that her government has done its due diligence on the proposed project.

It is difficult to conclude that the announcement was anything more than a pre-election ploy to distract attention away from the damage that has been done to Winnipeg’s hospital system over the past six years.