Victoria Hospital ER part of larger issue

Opinion

The NDP government’s decision to reopen the emergency department at Victoria Hospital in 2027 will no doubt be welcomed by many in south Winnipeg.

Residents in that part of the city have argued they lost an essential service when the former Progressive Conservative government converted Victoria’s emergency room to an urgent care centre in 2017.

Reopening the ER, one of the NDP’s election promises in 2023, may provide more convenient access for people living nearby. But let’s not pretend it will solve Winnipeg’s worsening emergency room crisis.

Wait times are at or near historic highs, and there’s little evidence to suggest that adding another ER will meaningfully reduce them. The problems driving long ER wait times are far more complex.

According to the latest data from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, the median wait time at Winnipeg’s ERs and urgent care centres in August was 3.87 hours — up from 3.35 hours in August 2024. That’s just shy of the record four-hour peak reached in December 2023.

In some facilities, waits are much longer. Despite the NDP government’s boast that it has hired more than 3,400 net new health-care workers since taking office two years ago, the numbers aren’t translating into shorter waits or faster access to care.

It’s not just the emergency departments feeling the strain. Wait times for hip-replacement surgeries are the longest they’ve been in at least seven years. Knee replacement waits are the second highest they have been during the same period.

These trends tell a broader story: Manitoba’s health system continues to struggle with patient flow, co-ordination, and capacity — issues that cannot be fixed by reopening one emergency room.

Long ER wait times have many causes. One of the biggest is the shortage of staffed acute-care beds across the system. When hospitals are full — or close to it — ER patients waiting to be admitted simply have nowhere to go. They remain in emergency beds for hours or even days, creating a logjam that prevents new patients from being seen.

Compounding that problem is the persistent shortage of long-term care spaces and home care services. Hospitals continue to house so-called “alternate level of care” patients — people who no longer need acute hospital care but can’t be discharged because there’s nowhere appropriate for them to go.

Many of those patients are waiting for a personal care home bed or sufficient home care supports. Until those options expand, hospitals will remain clogged, and ERs will continue to back up.

There are also problems with how patients move through hospitals once they’ve been admitted. Co-ordination between wards, diagnostic services, and discharge planning remains slow and fragmented. A single delayed test or an unco- ordinated discharge can ripple across the system, keeping patients in beds longer than necessary.

These inefficiencies may not grab headlines, but they are a contributor to the long waits that frustrate patients and staff alike.

Reopening the Victoria Hospital ER might provide temporary relief to nearby residents who currently travel to St. Boniface or the Health Sciences Centre for emergency care. But those hospitals are struggling not because of geography, but because of systemic bottlenecks.

Without addressing the deeper causes, Manitoba’s ERs will remain gridlocked.

The government’s challenge is not simply to add more staff or reopen shuttered facilities. It must modernize the entire patient flow process and expand community and long-term care capacity.

Until that happens, the long waits will continue, regardless of how many emergency rooms the province opens. The Victoria ER may symbolize a return to local access and a promise kept. But without deep, systemic reform, it will not bring the relief Manitobans are desperate to see.