Health Care in Manitoba - Getting worse even faster under the NDP

A few weeks ago, the Conference Board of Canada released a very thorough report on provincial health care systems across Canada, and we got the bad (but not entirely unexpected) news that Manitoba had the worst provincial health care system in the country in terms of the overall quality of health care provided. It is a pretty sobering report.

And yesterday, I got further confirmation of just how bad things have become under the NDP after a meeting with front-line health care workers at St. Boniface Hospital. They made it very clear to me how Gary Doer and the NDP continue today to lead Manitoba towards a further decline in our health care system.

At St. Boniface, the hospital has announced NDP-supported changes which would lead to a major reduction in Health Care Aides on 5B and 5E medicine, on 6A and 8A family medicine, and in care for women and children. In total there will be a reduction of 48 health care aides.

One of the major problems with this plan is that a number of the wards will be left with only one health care aide at a time. When similar changes were made previously to reduce the number of health care aides on 4A South, the situation on the ward became virtually impossible, and a about a year later the number of health care aides had to be increased to from one to two.

There is a legitimate concern that this previous experience will now repeat itself with this new rounds of cuts.

The fact is, the NDP just don't get it. The Conference Board report found that Manitoba has the highest proportion of the population waiting more than a month for diagnostic or specialty visits. It also found Manitoba has the highest proportion of the population reporting difficulty obtaining health information or advice any time of day. Now, we see the NDP pushing Manitobans further away from timely, quality health care with their cuts to health care aides.

When is this NDP government going to stop putting Manitobans on hold for health care?