Manitoba's rural emergency departments closed for 80,000 hours in 2023: data
CBC
Every time Arborg Mayor Peter Dueck walks out his front door, he's reminded his community is missing a critical service.
The small Manitoba town's hospital, right across the street from Dueck's home, often has a sign reading "emergency services are not available today."
"That sign seems to be out there almost 30 days every month," Dueck said in an interview with CBC in late March.
The Arborg & Districts Health Centre's ER shut its doors indefinitely Nov. 6. Before that indefinite closure, it was closed 72 times in 2023 — adding up to an equivalent of 332 days.
The Interlake community's ER is not the only one that's seen frequent closures.
Emergency departments across Manitoba closed their doors 1,828 times in 2023, according to data obtained by CBC News through a freedom of information request. That amounts to more than 80,000 hours worth of closure — the equivalent of 3,348 days.
Some closures were for a few hours, while others lasted weeks. Four ERs, including Arborg, closed their doors indefinitely last year.
"None of that's good," said Dr. Alecs Chochinov, an emergency physician at Winnipeg's St. Boniface Hospital and a past president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.
"It's reflective of problems in the system in staffing EDs," and of "a growing existential problem around the country with ERs," he said.
Historically, there's been "one in every town," and the sense was that "the way you need to have a safe town is to have a hospital and an ER," said Chochinov.
Emergency departments should be able to look after the initial stage of any acute injury or illness and be accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week, he said.
"You can't, by definition, schedule emergencies," Chochinov said.
"[If] you don't have the resources, human or otherwise, to deal with that stuff that's going to come in that's life-threatening or you don't have the 24/7 capacity, you're not really an emergency department."
ERs in three other rural Manitoba communities closed their doors indefinitely in 2023: Carberry on Aug. 23, and Melita and Morris, both on Sept. 1.
