Manitoba plans to send as many as 300 spinal-surgery patients to Fargo

Manitoba will send as many as 300 patients awaiting spinal surgery to Fargo, N.D., to get their operations — and may send joint-surgery patients south as well.

The province has reached a deal with Sanford Health, a non-profit health-care system based in the Dakotas, to conduct surgeries on spinal patients who have already waited more than a year, enduring chronic pain and deteriorating mobility in the process.

"We acknowledge the suffering. We acknowledge the waits," said Dr. Ed Buchel, the provincial surgery lead for Manitoba Shared Health, adding there was no option to send patients elsewhere in Canada because every province is struggling to meet the health-care demands of the Omicron surge.

"We [must] do something about it now and acknowledge that we don't have a system that is able to handle that. But that doesn't mean we're ignoring the fact that we have to build."

No one with a broken back, an unstable spine or cancer will be sent to Fargo, Buchel said. Sending urgent cases south would be too upsetting to families, he added.

Buchel said Shared Health has identified 150 to 300 spinal-surgery patients who are healthy enough to travel to Fargo by car, but whose conditions are too serious to put off further.

"They're not super-easy cases that we can do as outpatients. They're not our super-difficult cases or our very acute cases. They're in the middle and that's the group that's waiting the longest," he said.

"These patients were waiting too long before the pandemic, and now this has just extended their wait even further."

Buchel said the waitlist for spinal surgery — just one component of a provincial backlog of more than 150,000 surgeries and other medical procedures — has continued to grow in recent weeks, thanks to the diversion of hospital staff from operating rooms to COVID-19 care.

Shared Health is still reducing its surgical capacity because of the Omicron surge, he said, even as a provincial task force works on plans to expand it.

Only patients willing and able to travel to the Sanford Medical Center in Fargo will be selected, Buchel said. Their family members are entitled to the same provincial financial supports they would receive if they travelled for medical procedures within Canada, he said.

The first patients will travel to Fargo next week or the following week. Patients will travel to Fargo for months while Manitoba works on increasing its surgical capacity, Buchel said.

He said he could not estimate how much the surgeries in Fargo will cost the province. Sanford Health charges rates comparable to the cost of the procedures conducted by public health care in Canada, he said.

Three of the doctors who will do the work in Fargo were trained in Canada, including two trained in Winnipeg, he said.