Manitoba health minister Uzoma Asagwara says the death of a man waiting for care in the emergency room at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre has made it clear the province needs to do more to prevent such incidents from happening again.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Manitoba’s Health Minister has ordered a review into the death this week of a middle-aged man who spent eight hours waiting for care at the emergency room of the province’s largest hospital, ultimately succumbing to his significantly worsening condition.
Uzoma Asagwara, who also serves as Premier Wab Kinew’s deputy, said the tragic death at Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre on Tuesday has made it clear that the province needs to do more work to prevent such incidents from happening again.
But in a hastily called press conference late Wednesday, Mx. Asagwara declined to answer questions about the circumstances or injuries that led the man to arrive by ambulance at the hospital around midnight the day before, or why he had to wait there all night for treatment until his death that morning.
The patient was triaged as not urgent, according to hospital officials, but his condition deteriorated overnight, and he could not be revived.
“This is a tragedy and a devastating loss that should not have happened,” the minister said. “We need to learn from this.”
Emergency departments across Canada remain bogged down by lengthy waiting times, exacerbated after COVID-19 first struck nearly five years ago. However, patients dying while waiting for care are relatively rare occurrences.
In Winnipeg, there have been multiple deaths in recent years among patients waiting for care in emergency departments: for example, at St. Boniface Hospital in January, 2024; Grace Hospital in November, 2023; and the Health Sciences Centre in February, 2023. Other provinces, including Alberta and Ontario, have also recorded deaths among patients awaiting timely care.
This week’s death in Manitoba has drawn comparisons to the case of Brian Sinclair, who died in the same Winnipeg emergency room in 2008. An Indigenous man who was a double amputee, Mr. Sinclair died during a 34-hour wait from a treatable bladder infection. An inquest into his death led to the overhaul of 10 emergency departments across the province but was criticized for not addressing concerns of racism in the health system.
Mx. Asagwara would not provide any information on Wednesday about the man’s identity, including whether he was experiencing homelessness or belonged to a vulnerable community.
The newly launched review into his death will be overseen by Shared Health, the province’s central health care agency, the minister said. Such reviews typically look into the measures taken around a given event at a medical facility, culminating with a set of possible changes to protocols and practices. However, those reviews are usually conducted privately and many of their results are not made public.
Mx. Asagwara, asked whether the Manitoba government would support a judicial inquest, which would publicly probe how this case this week was handled, declined to answer.
“I made that request for it to be treated as a critical incident, deemed a critical incident, and the regional health authority agreed to do so. And so, it’s being investigated as such,” the minister said, without indicating a timeline for how long the investigation would take to be completed.
“This tragedy is being treated with the highest level of urgency and the highest level of seriousness. We know the importance of getting all questions answered, making sure we have a full understanding of what has happened here, and making sure that we take steps as a result of what we learned to prevent this from happening in the future.”
Philippe Lagacé-Wiens, a medical microbiologist at St. Boniface Hospital, said emergency departments have been particularly strained over the last three weeks with a dramatic increase in influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, cases.
He said minimal space in other wards has amplified the backlog as patients have nowhere to go: “It absolutely could have played a role in this tragedy.”
Shawn Young, chief operating officer of the Health Sciences Centre, said at a separate news conference Tuesday that the man who died was going to wait 10 hours or longer before he could be seen. That’s because he was considered a “low-acuity patient,” Dr. Young said.
Nearly 100 patients, consistent with the recent norm for the hospital though beyond its usual capacity, were in that Winnipeg emergency room throughout the night, and six of the hospital’s resuscitation beds were occupied, Dr. Young said. Frigid weather was also a factor for the higher-than-usual volume of patients, which, the doctor explained, is common during the winter, as people seek shelter and safety from the cold.
“The whole health system was backed up,” he said, though adding that staffing was close to its regular levels at the time – with about 21 nurses working then.
Mr. Kinew’s New Democrats, elected in 2023, ended the Progressive Conservative rule in Manitoba in large part because of his party’s admonishment of the problems plaguing health care.
The NDP government has since promised to lower surgical and emergency-room wait times by hiring hundreds of physicians, nurses and home-care workers. They have also pledged to reopen emergency rooms at three hospitals in Winnipeg.
But Mr. Kinew acknowledged, in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail, that it would take “longer than one term in government” to fix the system or meaningfully move toward decreasing waiting times in the province as he had planned.
The maximum amount of time that nine out of 10 patients waited for care at the Health Sciences Centre was roughly 13 hours last November, according to the latest monthly report from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority. Wait times reached 12.3 hours at Grace Hospital and 12.4 hours at St. Boniface. One in 10 patients waited longer than those times.
As of Wednesday evening, emergency-room waiting times were 10 hours at the Health Sciences Centre for adults, 4.5 hours for kids there, eight hours at Grace Hospital and 11 hours at St. Boniface, according to the authority’s frequently updated dashboard.