Patient care at risk with NDP-ordered health cuts trickling down to front lines, nurses' union says

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."

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