‘They are scrambling’: Paramedics asked to help Manitoba emergency rooms due to staffing shortage

Staffing shortages at Manitoba’s hospitals continue to worsen, with the province’s largest hospital confirming it’s asking paramedics to help fill in the gaps.

The Health Sciences Centre (HSC) says it has begun asking paramedics to assist in the emergency room.

“I’m not surprised,” said Darlene Jackson, the president of the Manitoba Nurses Union. “We are in a critical nursing shortage, and we are in desperate times in our ERs at HSC.

“I think we’re in dire straits.”

Jackson says HSC is, at times, running with 10-12 nurses short on a shift, which is why paramedics are being called in to assist. But Jackson says she’s also not surprised that no paramedics were available this past weekend to work.

“They are as overworked and their workload is as heavy for them, they are as burned-out and as exhausted as nurses are in the system, so I am not surprised we didn’t see a big uptake in that request,” she said.

Jackson says the call out for paramedic support illustrates the dire situation in hospitals.

‘It’s routine practice’ says doctor

But a doctor says it’s something that hospitals have wanted to implement for some time now.

Dr. Shawn Young from HSC says paramedics are a great resource to help out nurses in the emergency department.

“We’ve been looking at this for years,” said Young. “This is our opportunity to actually make it happen more permanently, but I don’t know what that schedule will look like. The weekends are definitely an opportunity for us because that is when some of the trauma is at the worst and needs are at the greatest.”

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Young confirmed that Grace Hospital was also taking in paramedics for assistance.

“It’s a routine practice in Manitoba,” he said. “We just started making it operational as of this weekend.”

Paramedics are burning out: health assoc.

But Bob Moroz, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, says it’s not routine at all. He says there aren’t enough paramedics as it is, and adding this workload will lead to burnout.

“Rural paramedics are up to 40 per cent short in some areas and Winnipeg response times are also going up according to recent reports,” said Moroz. “Staffing ERs with paramedics doesn’t seem like a sustainable or well-thought-out plan to me, it sounds more like they are scrambling.”

The province has announced programs to train more nurses, but Jackson says this a long-term solution, and says the province needs to act now.

“I think we are going to be in even more trouble and see more of a bleed,” Jackson said. “I think that they need to start talking very quickly as to what it will take to retain nurses and what it is going to take to bring nurses back from those private agencies into the public system.”