More than 25% of patients left Health Sciences Centre's ER without being seen in July: data

More than one in every four patients who showed up in need of medical care at the emergency department of Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre in July ended up leaving without seeing a doctor.

The jump in the number of patients leaving without getting care, indicated in numbers from Shared Health, comes as median wait times at city emergency departments and urgent care centres have shot up to their highest levels in years.

Hospitals across Winnipeg all saw similar jumps in the proportion of patients who gave up on waiting in the summer months, according to data from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.

The biggest spike happened from June to July, when the number of people who left before being treated more than doubled from 1,572 (7.9 per cent of all patients) to 3,265 (15 per cent).

That increase was experienced to some level at all the sites reflected in data from the last six months: emergency departments at Grace Hospital, St. Boniface Hospital and Health Sciences Centre (HSC), and urgent care centres at Concordia Hospital, Seven Oaks General Hospital and Victoria General Hospital.

But some fared much worse than others.

That includes HSC, where in July, 28 per cent of all the patients who arrived for emergency care ended up going home without getting medical attention.

At the St. Boniface Hospital ER, nearly 16 per cent gave up on waiting that month.

Those numbers dropped slightly in August, though HSC saw 24 per cent of patients — still nearly one in every four — go home without seeing a doctor.

At St. Boniface, that number was still nearly 12 per cent.

That was the same month staff at St. Boniface spoke out about "exceptionally dangerous" wait times in the hospital's emergency department.

A few weeks later, emergency nurses at HSC raised similar concerns about Manitoba's largest health-care facility.

Last month, the proportion of patients leaving without getting care at Winnipeg hospitals decreased slightly. But 2,534 people — almost 13 per cent of everyone who showed up for care — still left without being seen.

On average, the annual proportion of people who leave Winnipeg ERs and urgent care centres without being seen has hovered around three and five per cent of all patients recently, the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority's most recent annual report says.

But at HSC, that number has typically been closer to six to 10 per cent, numbers provided by Shared Health show.

Call-backs suspended 'indefinitely'

In previous years, some people who left a Winnipeg hospital without being seen would be contacted to see whether they still need medical attention as part of an outbound call program through the provincial health contact centre.

Those calls didn't reach everyone — only between 22 and 36 per cent over the past few years, the Winnipeg health authority's latest annual report says.

But that program was suspended in 2020 because of staff redeployment during the COVID-19 pandemic, which means not one of the thousands of patients who gave up on waiting in city hospitals since then has been followed up with.

And as health-care staff continue to be moved around in Manitoba, the plan is for the program to stay on hold "indefinitely," said a spokesperson for the health authority, which runs all of Winnipeg's hospitals except for HSC.

Challenges at emergency departments and urgent care centres in recent months — including ongoing staffing issues and other problems linked to the pandemic — have contributed to longer wait times for patients with less urgent needs, the WRHA spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Shared Health, the provincial health organization that operates HSC, said the same thing has happened there, where wait times for the least sick patients are "well above normal levels."

That spokesperson said wait times have also been affected by people who possibly delayed getting care because of concerns about COVID-19.

Those patients "are now generally sicker and requiring longer length of stays in hospital, interrupting normal patient flow," the Shared Health spokesperson said.

And while the overall vacancy rate in emergency departments is now about 20 per cent, the spokesperson said they expect that to drop to around 14 per cent "as new hires come into the department in the next week or so."