Nickel Belt News Volume 62 • Issue 03
Friday, January 21, 2022
Thompson, Manitoba
Serving the Norman Region since 1961
‘Huge failure:’ Leaf Rapids hospital closed ‘until further notice’ BY DAVE BAXTER
LOCAL JOURNALISM INITIATIVE REPORTER, WINNIPEG SUN
Nickel Belt News photo courtesy of Dennis Anderson Leaf Rapids resident Dennis Anderson.
A health centre in a remote Northern Manitoba community that was supposed to open Jan. 10remains closed because of staff shortages and one northern resident says he is now concerned because residents who live near the health centre will be deprived of basic and possibly lifesaving health care. “Basic medical care is a basic human right and governments have duties to ensure these rights are ensured,” 59-year-old Leaf Rapids resident Dennis Anderson said. “And even during a national emergency
like the pandemic basic medical care is a human right and they have deprived us of that.” On Dec. 28, the Northern Regional Health Authority (NRHA) announced that the Leaf Rapids Health Centre would be temporarily closed because of persistent staffing shortages and at the time it was announced that the centre would reopen on Jan. 10. When the anticipated reopening day arrived, the NRHA issued a statement saying the health centre will remain closed “until further notice.” Anderson, who lives in the community of about 580 residents that sits 750 kilo-
When pandemic ends, Manitoba health care system will need to expand, says NDP leader BY IAN GRAHAM
EDITOR@THOMPSONCITIZEN.NET
The strain that the emergence of the COVID-19 omicron variant is putting on Manitoba’s health care system shows that the province needs to start thinking about its permanent expansion once the current crisis is over, the Opposition leader says. NDP leader Wab Kinew, who spoke to the Nickel Belt News in December during a visit to Thompson, also says the Progressive Conservative government should improve its communication about the coronavirus pandemic. “One of the things that really helps folks to buy into public health and to understand the severity of the situation is when we share the best information that we have with them,” he said. “I think the government’s decision to reduce the amount of updates per week was at a time when they thought that we were going to be leaving the pandemic. That’s clearly not happened so, given the fact that we need to maintain people’s motivation with the public health supports, that we need to continue motivating people to get vaccinations, I think it’s good to step up the information-sharing.” Manitoba reported 717new cases of COVID-19 on Jan. 17, as well as 601 hospitalizations due to the virus, up 84 from three days earlier. The number of patients in intensive care also went up by two and Kinew says ICUs are already overtaxed. “We had people that work in the system who are speaking off the record because they fear for their jobs,” the NDP leader said. “Weeks ago, people were saying the ICUs were full so you can only imagine that now that the COVID situation has got
so much worse that the situation keeps getting worse.” The need to pull people from other areas of the health care system to staff temporarily expanded ICUs leads to people with non-COVID health problems suffering. In the north, which has seen nealry 300 new COVID cases on some recent days and has 40 residents who are hospitalized due to COVID, the number of endoscopies dropped from June to October, resulting in the waitlist for the diagnostic procedure in the region growing by more than 50 over a fivemonth period. By the end of October last year, there were 633 people in the north on the waitlist, up from 581 at the end of June. Fewer than 100 of the procedures were completed each month from July through October, with only 17 performed in August. “We’ve got to make sure that we get through this immediate challenge of the pandemic but even once we get through that there’s big challenges waiting around the surgical backlog and the diagnostic backlog,” said Kinew. “It’s a ticking time bomb. It continues to get worse every time we have a surge like this one when those folks can’t get the health care they need.” What the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, Kinew says, is that the health care system in Manitoba is operating near capacity at the best of times and that unanticipated demands on resources, such as the COVID pandemic of the past two years, can push it nearly to the point of collapse. That is why he has called on the provincial government to ask for military assistance as the current wave of the pandemic continues. Right now, he says, the current needs are more than it can handle,
Thompson Citizen photo courtesy of Wab Kinew/Facebook Manitoba NDP leader Wab Kinew in a Facebook photo from November 2021. though that might not have been the case if the government had started building it up after the pandemic first arrived in Manitoba in March 2020. “Here we are two years later and we’re still saying let’s strengthen the health care system,” Kinew said. “What have we been doing for these past 20-plus months? At this point we don’t even have the option to make those kind of long-term gradual steps. We need an all hands on deck, ring the alarm type of response. We had well over a year-and-a-half where we could have been taking more methodical reasonable steps to training nurses, bring them along through the critical care training program, get the other health care professionals like respiratory therapists into position. If we had spent the last 20 months taking those steps one by one I think we’d be in a much better position overall as a province.” Although the process of lurching from one crisis to another over the course of the pandemic is not ideal, Kinew feels it at least has made it
plain that there are serious gaps in Manitoba’s health care system that need to be addressed. “One thing that’s clear is that health care is going to have to be expanded going forward because, even let’s hope we get to the end of the pandemic stage of COVID, COVID will still be here and there is going to be a greater need for health care as a result,” he said. “It probably looks like we’ve got to permanently expand the number of ICU beds in Manitoba by like 20 or 30. It looks like we probably have to increase the access to primary care in the Northern Health Region and some of the other health regions. We’ve been through this traumatic experience of the pandemic. It seems like the responsible thing to do would be to study it, figure out what worked, what didn’t and then come back with recommendations for the future. Things have changed substantially and we need to be smart enough at a society level and at a government level to adapt and respond to that new reality.”
metres north of Winnipeg, said he is worried that the ongoing closure could lead to residents in the area not getting medical attention when they need it and said he believes it is becoming “a matter of life and death.” “The irony is that the clinic is closed and everything that could possibly be needed to save a life is beyond those doors, but the doors are locked and unmanned,” Anderson said. “So it’s a very real chance that someone goes to that health centre not knowing it’s closed and rings that doorbell and no one will answer. Someone could die on those hospital steps and just inches away there is equipment that could save their life. “We are sitting here with a medical centre that can provide all those services and yet we are provided with nothing.” Frontline health-care worker shortages have been an ongoing issue across Manitoba recently because of the rapid spread of the omicron variant, as many workers in recent days and weeks have either contracted COVID-19 or been forced to isolate because of COVID symptoms. “It’s just not acceptable, it is just a huge failure and as of now it does not seem like there are any solutions,” Anderson said. “It’s not the fault of the nurses or the doctors, this is failure of government and even before COVID these had been longstanding issues for a very long time.” In a statement sent to the Winnipeg Sun Jan. 11, an NRHA spokesperson said that recent staffing shortages and health centre closures in the province and in the north have been due to COVID-19 cases and symptoms among healthcare workers in the area and that they cannot yet say when the Leaf Rapids Health Centre might reopen. “Firstly, let’s start with saying that no one likes to close a health centre, even temporarily,” the spokesperson said. “We have been forced to take this decision as a result of staff falling ill, staff being excluded due to COVID-19 screening and our usual replacements not being available. “To keep the health centre open, we do not have the necessary complement of staff to maintain safe operation at this time. Our goal remains to open as soon as we can safely do so. As for the date of reopening, that is not known at this time.”
The spokesperson also said that health-care staffing has been an ongoing challenge in Northern Manitoba and has now been compounded due to the rapid spread of the omicron variant. “The NRHA continues to work tirelessly to ensure all our facilities and sites are adequately staffed,” the spokesperson said. “However, staff sick calls, staff exclusions and the inability to rely on agency staff make staffing a challenge.” The NRHA said that while the Leaf Rapids Health Centre is closed there will be no services provided and all clinical care or support will be provided in Lynn Lake, which is an approximately two-and-a-half-hour drive from Leaf Rapids, or Thompson, which is an approximately four-hour drive from the community. The head of an organization that represents First Nations whose members rely on the Leaf Rapids Health Centre for medical care said Jan. 10 that the closure is “reprehensible.” “I am extremely concerned to hear of the impact of the closure on Leaf Rapids citizens,” said Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO) Grand Chief Garrison Settee in a press release. “I am worried about the well-being and safety of MKO citizens who depend on accessing services in Leaf Rapids. It is imperative that we find solutions on an urgent basis to avoid unnecessary complications and potentially the premature passing of Manitoba citizens due to a lack of health services.’” Settee said MKO has not heard from the NRHA or the provincial government regarding the closure. He also says forcing people to seek medical care in other communities hours away is potentially a recipe for disaster as highway conditions in winter can be very poor and the closure means there is nowhere local for Leaf Rapids residents to get COVID tests or vaccines. “I urge the provincial and federal governments to make collaborative investments to stabilize and create long-term solutions for providing accessible health services in both Leaf Rapids and Gillam,” Settee said. Dave Baxter is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of the Winnipeg Sun. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada. -with files from Ian Graham