Manitoba’s NDP government has ordered Shared Health to cut administrative costs, claiming it intends to redirect that money to the front lines of health care in the province.
But the head of the Manitoba Nurses Union says the sting is going to impact the front lines “and ultimately, patient care” at the end of the day.
“This is really very disheartening news, just before the new year,” said MNU president Darlene Jackson.
She’s already getting messages from nurses who say their regional health authorities are no longer covering sick shifts and are limiting overtime shifts in order to save the money.
“Nurses are saying ‘we’re just going to work short, that’s just how it is,'” she said. “They’re going to be working with higher nurse-patient equivalents than they are now.
“When you cut funds, you cut essential services which means that more patients per nurse [and] less patient care.”
Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, in an emailed statement sent by their office, said Shared Health has been instructed to redirect eight per cent of its funding from the bureaucracy to the front lines and clinical services. Shared Health is the organization that oversees the delivery of health care in the province.
“It’s one step we’re taking to improve health care and make it work for you,” the statement said. “Manitobans were clear: they want more resources at the bedside and more support for the front-line nurses, aides, physicians, and allied health professionals, and less resources in the bureaucracy.”
Asagwara is holding a news conference at 2:30 p.m.
Jackson said the directive is reminiscent of Brian Pallister’s PC government ordering a 15 per cent cut to management in 2017.
“Health care is so lean, we’re right to the bone as it is. I don’t know how they’re going to possibly [do this],” she said.
“[Nurses are saying] we can’t give anymore. We’ve already done enough.
“If anything, our resources need to be bolstered. We need increasing in funding.”
Jackson said she’s been told that health authorities has been told to save an amount that is “in the $50-million ballpark.”
As it is right now, the province’s health-care system is being staffed with a baseline level of nurses, and making it work through overtime and private agency nurses, she said.
“That’s how we’re keeping our heads above water right now. So if we’re going to pull back on the overtime, that certainly is going to have an impact on patient care.”
A large part of the NDP’s election campaign in 2023 was the promise of fixing health care. The cuts are a big disappointment, Jackson said.
It’s been more than a year since the NDP won that election and “80 per cent of nurses are saying they have seen no improvement at all in our health-care system,” she said.
“We have seen announcements that they’re opening beds [but] the comment I hear from nurses all the time is, ‘how are they going to staff those beds? We can’t staff the beds we have now.'”
The idea of spending less on administration and more on nurses and doctors and others at the front line of care sounds good, Jackson said, “but in my heart I don’t think that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
“I can tell you that management nurses are worried about their ability to provide safe, quality patient care once this rolls out.”
PC Health Critic Kathleen Cook echoed those comments, also characterizing the NDP’s redistribution of funds as a cut.
“If it walks like a cut and it talks like a cut, I think it’s a cut,” she said. “It’s certainly not what the NDP campaigned on and I very much doubt that during their listening tour that this is the advice that they got from front-line workers.”
The NDP made billions of dollars worth of election promises and Cook says it appears as though the party is now trying to find ways to pay for those.
“I’m just surprised that they’ve decided to find the funding for those out of the health-care budget,” she said.
“It’s a very surprising and concerning decision … in a time when Manitobans are facing increasing wait times in our emergency rooms at the Grace and St. Boniface hospitals, increased wait times for diagnostic tests and surgeries.”