Regional hospital could return Ste Anne services: mayor

Ste Anne hospital could reverse years of service closures if it gets a regional designation: that is the message from Southeast bilingual community leaders.

Mayors and reeves from the town and RM of Ste Anne, La Broquerie, and Tache are trying to get a meeting with Premier Wab Kinew. They all signed a letter to the premier who, along with Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara, did not stop by Ste Anne Hospital on their way to visit Bethesda Regional Health Centre in Steinbach Nov. 29 as part of their province-wide listening tour with health care staff.

The four municipalities make up a quarter of the Association of Manitoba Bilingual Municipalities (AMBM). Ste Anne Hospital offers services in both official languages.

Town of Ste Anne Mayor Yvan St Vincent said recruitment to fill the staff shortages would be much less of an issue if the hospital got the funding that comes with regional designation.

The hospital’s emergency department was cut to 12 hours per day, and then eight at the end of 2023. The hospital has a helipad to receive emergency patients, but the department is only open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Southern Health at the same time said the obstetrics unit needed to be closed due to staff shortages. That closure was originally supposed to be for six months. At its peak, Ste Anne hospital was delivering around 120 babies a year, with recent years closer to 50-60 newborns.

“The biggest thing for us is the 24/7 access to emergency, and what the doctors and nurses tell us is the access to resources. So the lab time are impacted,” said St Vincent.

“We have all the facilities but from what I understand our lab is rarely used because it’s not staffed, because we don’t have in our opinion the proper designation.”

St Vincent said this means people must travel to Steinbach or Winnipeg to get tests done, which in turn clogs up those hospitals.

“Whenever you hear of someone going to Steinbach, it sounds like there’s quite the wait time there. It seems like a kind of no-brainer to us that if we could take some of that here it helps our residents and it would also take away from Steinbach wait times, which benefits them,” he said.

To get the ER operating to full 24-hour capacity and the obstetrics unit open, now-retired Southern Health chief medical officer Denis Fortier in December 2023 estimated the hospital would need eight or nine doctors.

The hospital was established in 1954. Its bilingual service is not an impediment to recruitment as much as the burnout suffered by staff, according to the mayor. St Vincent said he spoke with the staff at the hospital about it.

“It (speaking French) is a necessity to be hired here, and I always assumed that was a barrier to finding people. What we’re told by the doctors and nurses is there’s plenty of bilingual staff available, but of course they’re going to places where they make more money, they have better resources,” said St Vincent.

“They’re staffed thinly here so if someone is away sick asking other people to double up on their shifts, they’re burning people out.”

The leaders from the AMBM have been trying to get the Province’s attention on this for a while. They sent a similar letter almost exactly a year earlier in February 2024. The AMBM board of directors formally passed a resolution, and a statement was put out last June on their willingness to do any work needed to get the regional designation.

-with files from Svjetlana Mlinarevic