New team will work to slash ER wait times, Manitoba government says

CBC News

· Posted: May 01, 2025 6:57 PM EDT | Last Updated: 3 minutes ago

Manitoba has unveiled a squad of front-line workers who volition enactment to chopped hold times successful infirmary exigency rooms, by addressing issues crossed the health-care strategy that lend to delays.

"We person a agelong roadworthy up of us," Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said astatine a quality league connected Thursday. "Wait times are very, precise long."

The mean clip radical waited to spot a doc oregon a nurse at Winnipeg's 4 exigency departments (including the Health Sciences Centre's children's ER) and 3 urgent attraction centres reached a precocious of four hours successful December of 2023, according to a strategy papers released by the state connected Thursday.

"We're looking astatine reducing those hold times by astir an hour," Asagawara said. "But yet our extremity is to meaningfully little those hold times and prolong that implicit time."

The study also shows that betwixt March 2024 and March 2025, anyplace from 14 per cent to 17 per cent of patients left a Winnipeg infirmary without being seen oregon treated by a physician.

The radical of front-line unit announced Thursday, dubbed the "lower hold clip and strategy betterment team," has already been moving connected a strategy to trim hold times for months, Asagwara said, but it volition present beryllium expanded done consultation with different health-care workers. 

The caller strategy volition look astatine ways to improve access to different services, including semipermanent care, to trim the strain on ERs, said Dr. Kendiss Olafson, an interior medicine and captious attraction doc astatine the Health Sciences Centre who is co-chairing the team.

"We don't privation to conscionable hole the numbers. We really privation to hole and assistance the system," Olafson said astatine the quality conference.

Many of the challenges in ERs are connected to the fig of patients who nary longer request entree to exigency care, but can't determination elsewhere due to the fact that they are waiting for openings for different types of care, said Olafson.

The state is moving to tackle that issue by re-opening the province's virtual ward — which was launched during the pandemic to assistance people who person been different hospitalized get attraction from home.

The province is besides readying to grow its community intravenous program — a location care service for radical who request outpatient IV treatments — to let much patients to retrieve from home.

Another alteration would beryllium revamping the province's wellness accusation telephone line, Health Links, as Manitoba 811, integrating virtual exigency care to triage low-acuity patients distant from exigency rooms.

"We are trying to make a strategy that is little hospital-centric," Olafson said. 

"We person to determination distant from idiosyncratic practitioners to processing much high-functioning teams truthful that we tin summation the efficiency."

Other changes would include creating triage protocols to jump-start the archetypal appraisal and attraction process for patients, improving the workflow for discharge planning, and expanding the number of endoscopy procedures, including expanding play services, the state says.

Plan lacks measurable targets: PCs

Progressive Conservative wellness professional Kathleen Cook said the government's strategy is much of a "political papers than an actionable strategy," with fewer factual steps to trim hold times.

It besides lacks measurable targets, and the one-hour simplification goal falls abbreviated of the province's needs, said Cook.

For instance, to trim the fig of patients lingering successful the ER there's a request for much idiosyncratic attraction location beds, but Cook said the strategy falls abbreviated connected that.

"ER hold times are astatine decade-long highs," Cook said. "In bid to code that, what we needed to spot contiguous was a program that included … timelines and an investigation of what really needs to hap to little those hold times." 

This is not the archetypal clip the state has set a dedicated committee to code hold times, said Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson. She's acrophobic the caller team, similar others successful the past, won't nutrient a important driblet successful hold times.

"Every team … come[s] guardant with large recommendations, but wherever the rubber hits the roadworthy is erstwhile it gets to [the] authorities and whether recommendations are moved forward," Jackson said. 

She said past plans have stalled due to the fact that of a deficiency of funding for implementation.

Jackson besides said immoderate of the projected solutions, like the revamp of Health Links, mightiness not pb to a significant alteration to wait times, fixed a ample fig of patients who don't request an ER extremity up going determination due to the fact that they don't person a superior attraction physician.

"That's yet different limb that needs to beryllium looked at," Jackson said. "I truly anticipation that we spot immoderate betterment soon, due to the fact that hold times are expanding successful our ERs, twelvemonth implicit twelvemonth implicit year."