Emergency room wait times at one city hospital are often so long that a Winnipeg physician says patients are not getting the care they need -- and all that health-care workers can do is watch while people wait and suffer.
"The physicians, the nursing staff, the health-care aids, everybody that provides care, we essentially have a front-row view of human suffering, and that's exceptionally challenging," said Dr. Noam Katz, a staff emergency physician at St. Boniface Hospital.
Last Wednesday, some patients at the emergency room at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre were reported to have waited as long as 20 hours for care, while on the same day, waits longer than 10 hours were reported at the emergency room at St. Boniface Hospital.
Those long wait times continued this week. On Monday, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority's My Right Care website, which provides a snapshot of current wait times at several emergency departments, showed wait times as of 5:21 p.m. CT listed as 12.5 hours at St. Boniface Hospital, and more than 14 hours at the Health Sciences Centre.
What those long wait times are doing is greatly diminishing the care that emergency patients in Winnipeg are receiving, Katz said.
"Some people are coming in with really dangerous, life-threatening problems. Some people are coming in with less life-threatening, but still equally painful and distressing problems, and they have to wait upwards of 10, 15, 20 hours, sometimes more, to access care," he said.
"If you can imagine an eight-hour workday, that's two or three workdays that they wait before they access care."
The wait times are also making it harder for front-line health-care staff to properly care for emergency patients, Katz said, leading to frustration among many who work in emergency rooms.
"When we have these delays, and an inability to provide the care that you should be able to, this is when we talk about moral injury and burnout, where everybody is really struggling."
Katz, who has worked in the emergency department at St. Boniface for about eight years, called the current wait times "appalling."
He blames much of the current wait times on "access block," an issue that arises when patients who need to be admitted to an inpatient bed are unable to be transferred out of the emergency room in a timely manner, often leading to emergency room overcrowding.
"We cannot move people into emergency beds in our emergency department that are full or don't exist," he said. "Someone who has been admitted and completed treatment on a ward needs to be able to move out to an area where they can access the resources they need."
Katz also blames long wait times and lack of available beds on a lack of quality home care and personal care home beds in the province that he said is leaving elderly and sick people in hospital beds longer than they should be.
He said Winnipeg emergency rooms should start to initiate "surge protocol," which would see emergency patients transferred to other hospital wards for care when emergency rooms are packed.
"That's maybe challenging for people in those wards, but having all those people in the emergency room is a much higher risk," he said.
Katz said he worries "every day and every shift" that the long delays for emergency care will lead to tragedies and possible fatalities that could have been prevented.
No quick fix, health minister says
Manitoba Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said on Monday that despite the recent long wait times, they believe the province is taking the right steps to reduce those waits, and they blamed some of the issues on cuts made by the former PC government that was voted out of office in 2023.
"For years, hundreds of beds, literally over 500 beds, were cut from the system, which really not only exacerbated the access block, but really created a crisis," Asagwara said.
The health minister said that since taking power, the NDP government has added "300-plus beds" to the system.
Asagwara also said they do not agree that surge protocol would be a way to immediately lower those wait times.
"You can initiate a surge protocol, but if other areas aren't attached to what that protocol is or don't feel a level of accountability or that they're on the same team and trying to address that protocol, then things don't move as quickly as you would like to see them," they said.
They added the province is also focused on improving home care and increasing personal care home beds as a way to free up beds in the emergency room, but said there will be no quick fix to the current problems.
"I'm not saying that we're going to see this trend happen in a way where suddenly you're going to see hours and hours of improvement in a month," Asagwara said. "This is a trend that we want to see sustained and moving in the right direction.
"This is a marathon, not a sprint."