Opening hospital beds takes staff

Opinion

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This article was published 06/12/2023 (642 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara’s announcement last week to open more treatment beds at Grace Hospital may give the impression the new NDP government is moving swiftly to heal the province’s beleaguered health-care system.

However, without details on how it plans to staff those beds, the announcement was more of a public relations exercise than a concrete plan to solve chronic overcrowding at the hospital.

Asagwara announced funding for 31 additional beds at the hospital over the next year. It would be a significant and much-needed expansion of the 217 medical and surgical beds currently staffed at the hospital.

Grace is among several hospitals in Winnipeg struggling with severe overcrowding, along with Health Sciences Centre and St. Boniface Hospital. The bed shortage at all three acute care facilities is causing congestion in emergency departments as admitted patients wait sometimes days for an opening on a medical ward.

The bed shortage is also causing long wait times for surgical procedures, such as hip and knee replacement surgery.

Adding more staffed beds to the system would be a good first step towards building the needed capacity in the system to bring down those wait times and improve patient care.

The Grace Hospital plan also includes the creation of a family medicine unit at the facility. Grace is the only hospital in the province with an ER that does not have such a unit.

However, adding more beds to the system without a plan to staff them won’t do much to alleviate hospital congestion.

Asagwara’s announcement did not include any details on where the hospital plans to find the front-line workers to staff the additional beds.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority said 75 full-time positions would be required to open the beds, including nurses, allied health-care workers and non-clinical staff such as housekeeping and record-keeping. While filling the latter positions may face few challenges, recruiting nurses (and to some degree allied health staff) has been an uphill battle in the health-care system.

After the previous Progressive Conservative government consolidated hospital operations in Winnipeg between 2017 and 2019, many nurses left the public system, either through early retirement or by taking jobs in the private sector. While the province has announced some incentives to attract nurses back into the public system, health authorities are still struggling to fill vacancies. That challenge has been amplified by a national nursing shortage that is affecting all provinces.

So what is the NDP government’s plan to overcome those obstacles? It hasn’t said. Beyond vague commitments to continue with existing nursing recruitment and retention efforts, the province has not announced any new strategies.

The NDP government has been in office less than two months. No one is expecting immediate improvements in the health-care system. Hiring staff, opening more beds and making operational changes — such as last month’s announcement to add more resources to weekend shifts at hospitals to speed up patient discharges — takes time.

Still, there’s little point announcing more beds at any hospital without a legitimate plan to staff them.

The most immediate challenge in health care is recruiting and retaining front-line staff. Without a well-defined strategy on how to fill those front-line positions, announcements like the one last week at Grace Hospital are more about appearances than concrete action.