‘A concern for everyone’: Ste Anne Hospital stops most surgeries for at least 6 months

Ste Anne Hospital’s operating rooms have stopped most surgeries since last fall due low staffing levels and won’t reopen for at least six months.

A spokesperson for Southern Health told The Carillon the hospital paused all surgeries for its three operating rooms in October 2025 except urology procedures, which include kidney or bladder surgery. The paused surgeries cover general day surgeries, small operations that discharge patients the same day.

The hospital and Steinbach’s Bethesda Regional Health Centre share the same operating room staff, surgeons and anesthetists, the spokesperson said. Patients can either go to Steinbach for surgery or be referred to Winnipeg until operations resume in Ste Anne.

Town of Ste Anne Mayor Yvan St. Vincent is worried the surgery pause will cause town residents to endure long waits in Steinbach for surgery.

“I think any time we have rooms that are are nice and new and beautiful, and they’re not being used in health care. I think that’s a concern for everyone in the province,” he said.

Ste Anne Hospital’s operating rooms performed 1,456 general day surgeries from October 2024 to October 2025, according to Southern Health.

St. Vincent hopes the hospital will return to 24/7 care and receive regional designation, which would allow it to hire more staff with competitive wages and expand care, he said. Maintaining bilingual services at the hospital, such as surgeries, is necessary for many Francophone residents, St. Vincent added.

“There’s a lot of our residents that that’s their first language. So communication is way easier and far more comfortable for them to access those services in their native tongue,” he said.

The province created a working group to explore changing the hospital into a regional facility in September 2025. But St. Vincent said the group hasn’t been formed yet, and he hasn’t been given any timelines on when any decisions will be made.

His goal in adding the regional designation is preventing Ste Anne residents from travelling to Winnipeg or Steinbach for care.

“We were encouraged when this government got elected because they said their health care was their biggest priority. We’re just kind of reminding them of that promise because we haven’t seen that yet here in Ste Anne,” St. Vincent said.

RM of Ste Anne Reeve Richard Pelletier echoed St. Vincent’s concerns and said the operating room closure signals a bad direction for health care in the area.

“The hospital is definitely on the bottom of the list of hospitals taken seriously because the government is not helping to make it a regional hospital,” he said.

Many residents can only go to Winnipeg’s St. Boniface hospital for care in French and they struggle finding transportation, adding extra stress for people, Pelletier said. The regional designation is a matter of equitable health care for residents to receive treatment in their municipality and not be forced to move, he said.

“There’s no incentive for any young technician or young doctor to be in Ste Anne because we’re not treated as a regional and serious hospital,” Pelletier said.

Southern Health previously told The Carillon in March 2025 the Bethesda hospital is seen as serving people in Ste Anne. A spokesperson didn’t say whether regional designated facilities offer different services or more competitive salaries.

Darlene Jackson, president of the Manitoba Nurses Union, called the operating room closure a “real shame.”

If the hospital had the staff, the operating room could take some of the load off Winnipeg hospitals and get people off surgical wait lists faster.

“It’s just out of the city, but if you don’t have to wait, you know, an inadvertently long time, that may be somewhere where you want to go. So that’s a real shame that those operating rooms are not running,” she said.

She said Southern Health needs to do more to attract nurses to work in Ste Anne because for many nurses it may not be their first choice. Jackson also noted more nurses need to graduate from programs faster and stay in Manitoba.

A spokesperson for Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said recruitment efforts are are underway, and any planning for reopening is tied to increasing staffing levels. They didn’t provide a timeline for granting the hospital regional designation, when asked by The Carillon.