Patient care at risk with NDP-ordered health cuts trickling down to front lines, nurses' union says
Shared Health spending $68M on corporate services, 'not an acceptable approach': health minister
Manitoba's NDP government has ordered health-care authorities to cut millions in administrative costs, saying 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 already impacting the front lines and, ultimately, patient care.
"This is really very disheartening news, just before the new year," union president Darlene Jackson said Tuesday.
Jackson said she's already getting messages from some nurses who say their employers 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 … more patients per nurse [and] less patient care."
Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said regional health authorities has been instructed to redirect eight per cent of its funding from its bureaucracy to the front lines and clinical services.
Regional health authorities were made aware of the governments's directive in September, according to a government official.
It's a "very achievable" target, Asagwara said.
"The ballooning bureaucracy in health care needs to be redirected to the front lines, to make sure that we have more staff and that patients have better care," they said during a Tuesday news conference.
Shared Health — the organization that oversees the delivery of health care in the province — is spending $68 million on corporate services, "and when you dig into those numbers, you begin to see very quickly … those corporate titles have no impact, no direct relationship to the care people are receiving at the bedside," Asagwara said.
"To me that's not an acceptable approach. We should be prioritizing hiring more nurses, more doctors, more health-care aides and allied health-care professionals, and directing regional health authorities and health leadership to take that approach has allowed us to see success in all those areas."
Any impacts to front line 'unacceptable'
Asagwara said if it's true some employers aren't "following that very clear direction" and making cuts in other areas, the minister wants to know about it.
"It's unacceptable and it would need to be addressed immediately."
The province's directive to cut eight per cent of management costs is reminiscent of Brian Pallister's Progressive Conservative government ordering a 15 per cent cut to administration spending in 2017.
"I believe that employers went leaner then," Jackson said. "I'm not really sure that there is a place to cut in bureaucracy," she added, explaining, if anything, the amount spent on health care should increase.
Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, said in an emailed statement the solution the NDP is proposing isn't the right one.
"The notion that there is a bunch of fat to trim in health care is a myth. We already have fewer managers who are more disconnected from front-line care, and they are spending more time dealing with staffing shortages than they are actually managing," Linklater said.
"The solution isn't more arbitrary, top-down cuts — that approach is what got us into this mess. The solution is to invest in retaining and recruiting more staff, and listening to solutions that front-line staff are proposing."
Jackson with MNU said she's been told that health authorities have been directed to look for savings "in the $50-million ballpark." The government wouldn't provide an estimated financial figure.
The province's health-care system is currently staffed with a baseline level of nurses, and relies on overtime and private agency nurses to function, 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."
The NDP has pledged to reduce the size of health-care bureaucracy since before the party was elected to office in 2023.
Earlier this year, Shared Health eliminated 24 non-unionized administrative jobs and cut some recruitment jobs.
The province's latest directive to slash administrative costs, which Jackson said is trickling down to the front lines, is disappointing from a government that vowed to fix the health-care system.
More than a year later, 80 per cent of nurses who responded to a MNU survey "are saying they have seen no improvement at all in our health-care system," Jackson 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, 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 … this is the advice that they got from front-line workers."
Cook said it appears as though the NDP is trying to pay for its election promises.
"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."
With files from Ian Froese