Tories owe Manitobans thorough examination of health system failure By: Tom Brodbeck Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 18, 2022

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/03/2022 (917 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There are times when a public system fails so spectacularly that an independent investigation is needed to determine the cause of the collapse and to make recommendations to avoid future breakdowns.

The death of Krystal Mousseau in Manitoba and the airlifting of 57 critical-care COVID-19 patients out of province during the third wave of the pandemic last year is one of those cases.

Mousseau, a 31-year-old mother of two from Ebb and Flow First Nation died May 25 after a failed attempt to transfer her from Brandon to a hospital in Ontario. Manitoba’s intensive-care units were so overwhelmed at the time, they could no longer treat all critical-care patients. Health officials had no choice but to send the most stable ICU patients to other provinces for care.

Between May 18 and June 9, 57 ICU patients were flown to hospitals in three different provinces: 53 to Ontario (some as far away as Ottawa), two to Alberta and two to Saskatchewan. At the time, Manitoba was the only province that sent patients outside its borders.

Saskatchewan followed suit a few months later, sending 27 ICU patients to other jurisdictions.

The question of why Manitoba was one of only two provinces that could not treat its own critical-care patients during the pandemic has never been fully answered. Many theories have been floated, including the most obvious: that Manitoba had less ICU capacity per capita than other provinces, especially after the overall number of ICU beds was reduced under the Progressive Conservative government’s hospital consolidation plan.

Even if that was the case, it doesn’t give Manitobans a full answer. The situation is far more complicated than that. Hospital bed counts per capita don’t provide a complete picture of system capacity. It provides no insight into other important factors, such as staff-patient ratios and the level of training of redeployed staff.

The question of why Manitoba was one of only two provinces that could not treat its own critical-care patients during the pandemic has never been fully answered.

It also doesn’t tell us about the acuity of patients in ICUs compared with other jurisdictions, or differences in risk factors, including those related to age, race or underlying conditions.

What we do know for certain is the province’s health-care system experienced a major collapse at a time when Manitobans needed it the most. Manitoba could not care for its own. Sending dozens of patients hundreds of kilometres away by air was far from ideal. It appears in some cases, including Mousseau’s, transport teams may not have had the proper training or equipment to transfer critically ill patients.

All of these issues require further investigation through a wide-ranging and independent probe, not only to find out what happened, but to prevent it from occurring again. The investigation should also include why the province did not impose further public-health measures at the time to protect hospital capacity (as recommended by countless medical experts), knowing a massive wave of Delta variant infections was on the way.

Whether such an examination should be a full-blown public inquiry or some other form of investigation is open to debate. But an independent probe of some kind is needed.

The province appears reluctant to launch such a probe. Politically, it wouldn’t serve the government well, especially since Premier Heather Stefanson was health minister during the hospital collapse. An independent probe may expose deficiencies in her leadership when she held that portfolio. The results of any such investigation would likely be released close to the time Manitobans go to the polls in a scheduled October 2023 general election. A politically unfavourable report would almost certainly hurt the Tories at the ballot box. It’s likely the main reason the premier is reluctant to shine a light on that dark period of the pandemic. She has instead tried to downplay Manitoba’s relatively poor performance compared with other jurisdictions.

Still, the premier should put those political considerations aside and launch a wide-ranging investigation into the ICU collapse. Making vague references to a possible probe into the province’s overall pandemic response, as she did again Friday, is meaningless.

A specific examination of what happened at Manitoba hospitals during the third wave is critical. Manitobans deserve answers.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca

Tom Brodbeck
Columnist

Tom has been covering Manitoba politics since the early 1990s and joined the Winnipeg Free Press news team in 2019.

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