Hospital safety solutions have to deliver results

It is encouraging that the Manitoba government has announced new and expanded measures to improve safety and security in hospitals. Any action that acknowledges the reality of violence faced by nurses and other health-care workers — and seeks to reduce it — is both necessary and welcome.

But the timing of those announcements, and the recent decision by nurses at St. Boniface Hospital to overwhelmingly grey-list their workplace, underscore a hard truth: despite progress, Manitoba’s hospitals remain unsafe for too many people working there.

Grey-listing is a serious step. It discourages nurses from seeking employment at a facility and is used only when other efforts have failed to produce meaningful change. That 94 per cent of nurses at St. Boniface Hospital voted in favour of grey-listing should give government and health-system leaders pause.

This is not a narrow or partisan protest. It is a near-unanimous expression of fear, frustration and exhaustion from nurses at Manitoba’s second-largest hospital.

St. Boniface is now the third Manitoba health facility to be grey-listed since August, following Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre and Thompson General Hospital. That fact alone should dispel any notion that these concerns are isolated or exaggerated. Three grey-listed hospitals in less than a year points to a systemic problem that incremental fixes have yet to resolve.

The incidents cited by the Manitoba Nurses Union are alarming. A nurse was sexually assaulted in a St. Boniface parkade in November. Earlier this month, a wheelchair was thrown at a nurse. These are not theoretical risks discussed in committee rooms. They are violent acts that occurred in places where people go to heal and where staff should reasonably expect to be safe.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara has said the province is listening and working alongside nurses, unions and health-system leaders to strengthen safety and security. The measures highlighted last week — including additional institutional safety officers, enhanced surveillance and controlled entrances — are positive steps. Some of them, however, were re-announcements, and others remain works in progress.

More importantly, many of these changes came only after grievances, arbitration rulings or the threat of grey-listing.

Nurses are also clear that safety is not just about security hardware or personnel. Staffing levels are central to the problem. As MNU president Darlene Jackson has noted, one of the top concerns for nurses — beyond the risk of physical or psychological assault — is the number of patients they are expected to care for.

Chronic understaffing leaves nurses stretched thin, increases stress and can exacerbate volatile situations, putting both staff and patients at risk.

That is why nurse-to-patient ratios feature prominently in the union’s recommendations for St. Boniface Hospital. A committee that included nurses spent more than a year developing those recommendations, which were delivered to the minister in December. Another meeting is scheduled for March. What remains absent is a clear timeline for implementation.

The NDP government points to the addition of 1,200 nurses since taking office in 2023. That is a meaningful gain. But recruitment alone will not solve the problem if retention continues to suffer. Nurses will not stay — and new nurses will not come — if hospitals are places where violence is tolerated and workloads are unmanageable. And even more so if they are places that nurses are telling their prospective colleagues are unsafe.

The province deserves credit for recognizing the seriousness of hospital violence and investing in solutions. But encouragement must be matched with urgency.

Until nurses can go to work without fear — and with staffing levels that allow them to provide safe, dignified care — the job remains unfinished.