Finding a better way than ramped up security

Opinion

Manitoba’s health-care system is facing a growing and unsettling challenge: increased violence at hospitals across the province.

It’s not only costing taxpayers millions of dollars more a year in increased security, it’s creating unsafe working conditions for doctors, nurses and allied health staff.

Manitoba’s six regional health authorities spent $35.4 million on security measures last year, according to freedom of information documents obtained by the Free Press.

It’s a budget line that has been growing steadily over the past 10 years.

It includes new institutional safety officers at Health Sciences Centre, more security staff at most Manitoba hospitals and an AI-powered weapon detector at three HSC entrances.

While these measures may be necessary to preserve the safety of health-care staff and patients, the trend should trouble every Manitoban.

This is not just a matter of dollars and cents. It is a symptom of a deeper, systemic failure to address the roots of violence and instability — particularly the overlapping crises of untreated mental illness and substance use disorders.

As hospitals increasingly resemble high-security zones rather than healing environments, we must ask: What kind of society are we building, and why are we waiting until crisis hits to intervene?

Nurses and other health-care professionals report being punched, spat on, bitten and threatened with weapons. There is no denying the immediate need for security in high-risk environments like emergency departments, especially in urban centres like Winnipeg.

Violence cannot be tolerated or dismissed as “part of the job.” But ramping up security spending — necessary as it may be in the short term — does not address the root causes of this disturbing trend. It is a reactive solution to a long-standing, preventable crisis.

At the core of the issue lies the province’s ongoing struggle with mental health and addictions. Front-line workers and health-care leaders alike have consistently pointed to the growing number of patients entering hospitals in acute psychiatric distress or in the throes of drug-induced psychosis. These individuals are often not criminals in the traditional sense — they are people who have fallen through the cracks of a fractured support system.

Decades of underfunding community-based mental health care and addictions treatment have created a pipeline that leads directly into emergency rooms and correctional facilities.

Early intervention is rare. Long wait times for mental health services are the norm. Harm reduction programs and supervised consumption sites — proven tools in addressing substance use disorders — remain politically contentious or under-resourced. Manitoba has still yet to open its first supervised consumption site.

If Manitoba hopes to make its hospitals safer — truly safer — then the response must go far beyond security contracts. The province must invest more in mental health care at the community level: crisis response teams, detox centres, transitional housing and long-term supports that help people stabilize and reintegrate.

This approach is not only more humane but also more fiscally responsible. Preventing a mental health crisis before it escalates into a violent outburst in an ER is far less costly than responding to it with guards, police and hospital lockdowns.

The safety and well-being of health-care workers should be non-negotiable. Nurses, doctors and paramedics are already operating under intense pressure. Adding the threat of physical assault only worsens burnout and deepens the staffing crisis. It sends the message that those who dedicate their lives to helping others must simply endure abuse.

That is unacceptable.

If we truly value our health-care system, we must protect those who power it not just with guards and gates but with a commitment to prevention, equity and care. That means addressing mental illness and addiction as the public health crises they are — and ensuring that Manitoba’s hospitals remain sanctuaries of healing, not battlegrounds.