WRHA cuts ties with VP amid hospital revamp

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This article was published 12/06/2019 (1926 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There has been a shakeup in the upper echelons of the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, and sources say it is due to fallout over the city hospital reform process.

WRHA president and chief executive officer Réal Cloutier informed employees Wednesday that Dr. Bruce Roe was no longer with the health authority.

Roe had been the health authority’s vice-president and chief medical officer since September 2017.

Before that, he spent more than a decade at St. Boniface Hospital as its chief medical officer and later as its president and CEO.

In response to queries from the Free Press, the WRHA would only confirm Roe’s departure.

He is being replaced on an acting basis by Dr. Ainslie Mihalchuk, who has been chief medical officer at Concordia Hospital.

Roe joined the WRHA executive team as the first round of the city’s emergency room and urgent-care centre closures was about to occur.

He leaves five weeks after consultant Dr. David Peachey delivered a blunt assessment to government of the reform process, detailing “seriously low” morale and patient-safety concerns at Concordia and raising questions about whether St. Boniface’s ER was prepared for the additional patients it would be receiving.

Sources said Roe’s departure comes after physician groups complained that concerns relating to the changes were not being taken into account in a timely manner.

Physicians at Concordia were particularly concerned about the government’s original plan to replace the ER with a walk-in clinic. Orthopedic surgeons at the hospital were worried about a lack of medical backup for patients.

Peachey recommended the ER be replaced by an urgent-care centre, which occurred June 3.

In an interview with the Free Press shortly after being named to the chief medical officer position, Roe described the Pallister government’s plan to consolidate the city’s six ERs into three — at Grace Hospital, St. Boniface and Health Sciences Centre — as “bold,” noting it would cause disruptions.

“We are changing the roles of hospitals, we are changing where care is delivered for many types of patients, and that, by definition, is disrupting the way we’ve always done things,” he said at the time.

Peachey advised the government to place a six-month pause on much of the second phase of its hospital reform. However, plans remain in place to convert the ER at Seven Oaks General Hospital to an urgent-care centre in September.

Roe replaced Dr. Brock Wright as the WRHA’s chief medical officer.

Wright is now CEO of Shared Health, a recently created provincial body that has taken over some of the administrative and clinical tasks once handled individually by each of the province’s five regional health authorities.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca