Manitoba NDP leader promises support for allied health professionals in election's final stretch

Manitoba NDP Leader Wab Kinew focused his attention on allied health-care workers in the party's sole election announcement on Monday.

Kinew pledged to include those workers — a category that encompasses more than 40 professions, such as occupational therapists, physiotherapists, social workers, mental health workers and lab technologists — in his party's previous commitment to spend $500 million on health-care recruitment over four years.

"Often in health care we talk about physicians and nurses and support staff, but health care is a complex system, and there are thousands of Manitobans who are there to diagnose us, to treat us and to keep us healthy," Kinew said as Manitoba entered its final full week of the campaign ahead of the Oct. 3 vote.

"Allied health professionals are an integral part of our health-care system here in Manitoba. You have taken care of us, and now it's time for us to take better care of you."

Kinew was joined at the announcement by physiotherapist Shelley Kowalchuk and Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, who both spoke of the impacts of cuts to allied health professions over the past seven years.

Staffing shortages in allied health have reached "crisis levels," Linklater said.

"We're stretched thin, relying on overtime and asked to do more with fewer supports and resources," he said.

The NDP said it would offer targeted incentives for allied health professionals to work in rural and northern Manitoba communities — including more diagnostic imaging and lab technologists — and put more allied health workers in communities with neighbourhood illness and injury clinics so patients can access diagnostic testing.

The party said it would also include allied health professionals like social workers, occupational therapists, mental health clinicians and pharmacists in primary care teams within family medical centres.