Agency nurse shortage leaves 'unacceptable' holiday closures at rural emergency rooms
CBC
A shortage of nurses has left several rural Manitoba emergency departments closed over the holidays.
Prairie Mountain Health, which services a wide swath of western and southwestern Manitoba, currently has eight rural emergency departments closed, leaving some communities with no open hospital and long drives to access urgent care.
"It's all had to do with vacancies that we currently have, both in nursing and in diagnostics," said Brian Schoonbaert, the region's CEO. "The issue is that we haven't been able to find agency nurses to pick up those spaces.
"There's a lot of openings that agency nurses can choose from and, unfortunately, we weren't able to pick up sufficient people during this period."
Some facilities, such as Roblin, Shoal Lake and Souris, are closed longer term due to physician shortages, according to Schoonbaert. But he says others, incuding Boissevain, Deloraine, Melita and Treherne, are due to nursing shortages.
Staffing shortages have also left the ER in Ste. Rose closed between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. daily.
"It is unacceptable," said Judy Swanson, mayor of the southern Manitoba municipality of Boissevain-Morton, located about 75 kilometres south of Brandon. "It was my understanding that we had sufficient staff to cover Christmas. I'm not sure what happened."
Prairie Mountain Health said both the emergency department and in-patient beds had to close due to nursing shortages.
Swanson says not only did the closure result in patients being moved to other facilities, but it also left area residents and highway travellers without a close facility.
"It's a huge concern," she said. "We're on No. 10 highway. There is no other health facility from the Peace Garden border, which is a 24-hour port [of entry], right through to Brandon.
"We're the only hospital on that whole highway, so we've had a blizzard, we've had storms, we've had things happening in our community and nowhere to go."
Swanson says Boissevain has shared emergency services with Deloraine, a town about 40 kilometres west of the town, for some time. But Deloraine is now also closed, leaving the only options Killarney to the east, or Brandon to the north.
Schoonbaert says he understands the frustrations and concerns, and the region has tried to take the distances people travel into account when determining which facilities to keep open and which to staff.
"Certainly this is not ideal," he said. "This is not what we want to do."