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This article was published 26/10/2017 (1062 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority says early indications are that the province’s most drastic reform in two decades is already helping improve care.

Median wait times in the city’s ERs and urgent-care centres dropped 28 per cent during the first three weeks of October compared with the same period last year. That was just one of a few facts and figures trotted out by senior WRHA officials and Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen Thursday morning.

"Efforts are already resulting in improvements to the quality and timeliness of patient care," Goertzen said. "We acknowledge that this is early days and we need to continue to monitor the system and work each and every day within the system to better care, to better timelines and to better outcomes."

Early indications also point to a smooth transition from emergency room to urgent-care centre at Victoria Hospital, WRHA vice-president Lori Lamont said.

Nine times out of 10, patients waiting in the emergency room at Victoria Hospital in September would wait up to 4.8 hours. But since becoming an urgent-care centre on Oct. 3 that wait-time maximum has dropped down to 3.3 hours.

Even more promising, Lamont said, is that the number of people needing daily transfers from Victoria’s urgent-care to a full ER has dropped to just under five people. It was averaging about seven people per day during the first week after the transition. Daily clinical reviews are conducted in those cases, she said, to make sure people are getting the information they require and going to the right place to get the care they need.

Unfortunately, Lamont said, the transition at Misericordia Health Centre has not been without hiccups. While urgent eye care is still available at the facility, other urgent-care services ceased on Oct. 3, but that message doesn’t seem to have reached everyone in the neighbourhood.

"We’re working right now to try to better understand who is still coming for care and what their needs are," Lamont said, as well as "how it is that we’ve not been able to reach them in terms of them understanding what alternatives may be available for care."

The number of people still trying to walk in for urgent care or calling to inquire about urgent care has ranged between 10 and 32 on a daily basis, peaking with 55 requests on Oct. 4, the day after the clinic closed. On Tuesday, the most recent date for which the WRHA provided data, Misericordia had 13 requests for urgent care.

In some cases, Lamont said, the health authority has paid to put patients in cabs to get the care they need.

"We would have hoped that this would have dropped off more quickly," she said.

Overall, however, Lamont spoke favourably about early results of Phase 1 of the two-phase health-change transformation. The WRHA said the median inpatient length of stay has also dropped closer to the Canadian average and that a survey of more than 600 ER patients done in early October indicated service satisfaction.

According to the health authority, 94 per cent rated their overall care positively, while 74 per cent rated their wait time positively and 96 per cent deemed staff to be respectful and courteous. Those figures are up slightly from a more comprehensive mail-out survey the WRHA did of roughly 5,500 ER patients last year.

NDP health critic Andrew Swan said he was "more than skeptical" about the wait-time numbers.

"I think every Manitoban should be very, very suspicious about the measures this government is going to use to try to show that their cuts are actually resulting in shorter wait times," he said.

Swan said he will await reports from independent bodies such as the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which measures wait times for various health procedures, before he believes the system is improving.

Swan said he’s concerned that the wait-time figures may be skewed by the fact that the WRHA is reporting median wait times as opposed to average wait times, as it did in the past.

He also noted that on Thursday morning, when Goertzen and the WRHA were making their announcement, he did an online check of the wait for service at Victoria hospital’s urgent-care centre and fount it to be three hours despite the presence of only seven patients.

"Who do they have working there if it takes three hours to get through seven people at an urgent-care centre?" Swan said. "Those are the kinds of questions that Manitoba patients are raising with us."

— with files from Larry Kusch

jane.gerster@freepress.mb.ca