New team will work to slash ER wait times, Manitoba government says
Average wait times peaked at 4 hours in 2023; initial goal will be cutting that by 1 hour, province says
Manitoba has unveiled a team of front-line workers who will work to cut wait times in hospital emergency rooms, by addressing issues across the health-care system that contribute to delays.
"We have a long road ahead of us," Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said at a news conference on Thursday. "Wait times are very, very long."
The average time people waited to see a doctor or a nurse at Winnipeg's four emergency departments (including the Health Sciences Centre's children's ER) and three urgent care centres reached a high of four hours in December of 2023, according to a strategy document released by the province on Thursday.
"We're looking at reducing those wait times by approximately an hour," Asagawara said. "But ultimately our goal is to meaningfully lower those wait times and sustain that over time."
The report also shows that between March 2024 and March 2025, anywhere from 14 per cent to 17 per cent of patients left a Winnipeg hospital without being seen or treated by a physician.
The group of front-line staff announced Thursday, dubbed the "lower wait time and system improvement team," has already been working on a strategy to reduce wait times for months, Asagwara said, but it will now be expanded through consultation with other health-care workers.
The new strategy will look at ways to improve access to other services, including long-term care, to reduce the strain on ERs, said Dr. Kendiss Olafson, an internal medicine and critical care physician at the Health Sciences Centre who is co-chairing the team.
"We don't want to just fix the numbers. We actually want to fix and help the system," Olafson said at the news conference.
Many of the challenges in ERs are connected to the number of patients who no longer need access to emergency care, but can't move elsewhere because they are waiting for openings for other types of care, said Olafson.
The province is working to tackle that issue by re-opening the province's virtual ward — which was launched during the pandemic to help people who have been otherwise hospitalized get care from home.
The province is also planning to expand its community intravenous program — a home care service for people who need outpatient IV treatments — to allow more patients to recover from home.
Another change would be revamping the province's health information phone line, Health Links, as Manitoba 811, integrating virtual emergency care to triage low-acuity patients away from emergency rooms.
"We are trying to develop a system that is less hospital-centric," Olafson said.
"We have to move away from individual practitioners to developing more high-functioning teams so that we can increase the efficiency."
Other changes would include creating triage protocols to jump-start the initial assessment and treatment process for patients, improving the workflow for discharge planning, and increasing the number of endoscopy procedures, including expanding weekend services, the province says.
Plan lacks measurable targets: PCs
Progressive Conservative health critic Kathleen Cook said the government's strategy is more of a "political document than an actionable strategy," with few concrete steps to reduce wait times.
It also lacks measurable targets, and the one-hour reduction goal falls short of the province's needs, said Cook.
For instance, to reduce the number of patients lingering in the ER there's a need for more personal care home beds, but Cook said the strategy falls short on that.
"ER wait times are at decade-long highs," Cook said. "In order to address that, what we needed to see today was a plan that included … timelines and an analysis of what actually needs to happen to lower those wait times."
This is not the first time the province has set a dedicated committee to address wait times, said Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson. She's concerned the new team, like others in the past, won't produce a significant drop in wait times.
"Every team … come[s] forward with great recommendations, but where the rubber hits the road is when it gets to [the] government and whether recommendations are moved forward," Jackson said.
She said past plans have stalled because of a lack of funding for implementation.
Jackson also said some of the proposed solutions, like the revamp of Health Links, might not lead to a significant change to wait times, given a large number of patients who don't need an ER end up going there because they don't have a primary care physician.
"That's yet another arm that needs to be looked at," Jackson said. "I really hope that we see some improvement soon, because wait times are increasing in our ERs, year over year over year."
With files from Ian Froese