Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 10, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 2025 A4 ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM NEWS I TOP NEWS Spin aside, ER wait times not improving D R. Shawn Young, the chief operating officer at Health Sciences Centre — where a middle-aged man died after spend- ing eight hours in the emergency de- partment Tuesday — said wait times at the hospital’s ER have improved over the past year. That’s not entirely true. Statistically, there’s been a tiny year-over-year improvement in ER wait times at HSC. The most recent available data show the median ER wait time was 3.77 hours in Novem- ber, down slightly from 3.9 hours in November 2023. That is statistically insignificant. It would be more accu- rate to say ER wait times at HSC are largely unchanged from a year ago. Young also didn’t say that ER wait times at HSC peaked in November 2023. They increased significantly and steadily from 2017 to 2023, after the former Progressive Conservative gov- ernment announced the consolidation of acute care hospitals in Winnipeg, including the closure of three ERs. To compare with a year ago while ignoring the previous six years is misleading. It gives the impression hospital overcrowding is improving when it isn’t. Here’s a more accurate assessment: the median ER wait time at HSC has more than tripled since November 2017, when it was 1.18 hours, Winnipeg Regional Health Authority data show. The median wait time is the point at which half of patients wait longer and half wait less to see a doctor or nurse practitioner. Wait times fluctuate from month to month. In the fall of 2017 and into the winter of 2018, the median ER wait time at HSC was at or below two hours. It increased to more than three hours by 2022 and has remained well above three hours ever since, peaking in November 2023. ER wait times at HSC have actually increased in recent months, from 3.17 hours in September 2024 to 3.53 hours in October and 3.77 hours in Novem- ber. That is the information Young should have communicated to the public. In- stead, he delivered political spin. “They’re not where we want them to be,” Young said of wait times during a Tuesday news conference. “It’s going to be a long time before we get them to where we want them to be.” Where, exactly, does HSC want them to be? Back to 2017 levels, when they were well below two hours? What is the plan to get there? So far, the public hasn’t heard one from HSC, Shared Health or the NDP government, beyond vague platitudes about adding more staff. We won’t know for some time why the man died in the ER Tuesday morn- ing. He was assessed as a low-acuity patient, which means on the Canadian triage and acuity scale (which assigns patients a number from one to five, one being the most acute), he was likely triaged as a four or a five. Under hospital protocol, he should have been re-assessed periodically. Young said he didn’t know how often the man had been re-assessed. The patient’s condition deteriorated after about eight hours, and he was taken to a resuscitation room, where he died. Either he was not assessed properly in the first place, or there were aspects of his condition that were not easily detectable. The public will learn more after the matter is thoroughly investi- gated. Health Minister Uzoma Asag- wara ordered a critical incident inves- tigation into the death Wednesday. We know the hospital was, as usual, overcrowded. There is a shortage of hospital beds on medical wards, which has been the case for at least seven years. That means many ER patients sick enough to be admitted to hospital could not be transferred to a hospital bed. Instead, they piled up in the emer- gency department, and ER doctors and nurses, who are already short-staffed, had less time to see new patients. That’s what drives up wait times and makes for unsafe ERs. Low-acuity patients wait longer, and high-acuity patients are seen first. But this case is a stark reminder of how long wait times for low-acuity patients, which are typically more than 10 hours at HSC, can end in disaster. Just be- cause a patient is triaged as a four or a five doesn’t necessarily mean they can wait 10 hours or more for care. There might be hidden conditions that should be addressed sooner rather than later. This incident should come as no great surprise. There is a severe short- age of staffed medical beds not only at HSC, but at all Winnipeg hospitals. The number of licensed hospital beds at HSC declined from 791 in 2020-21 to 781 in 2023-24, Shared Health’s 2023-24 annual report states. Average bed occupancy during that period increased from 83.45 per cent to a staggering 98.2 per cent. That means on average, there is barely any extra capacity in the hospital to absorb surges in patient demand. There is also a shortage of personal care home beds and other off-site, long- term treatment options for patients who should be moved out of hospital. Together, this causes hospital conges- tion and creates bottlenecks in emer- gency departments and urgent-care centres. The problem is far worse today at HSC and most other Winnipeg hospitals than it was two, five or seven years ago. At best, it has stabilized since November 2023. But to char- acterize ER wait times or hospital congestion as having improved over the past year is simply not true. tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca TOM BRODBECK OPINION Drilling for clues about climate A TEAM of international scien- tists, including a University of Manitoba academic, has re- trieved the world’s longest ice sample in an effort to learn about Earth’s cli- mate nearly a million years ago. Just after Christmas from a remote site in Antarctica, the team drilled thousands of metres to reach where the ice sheet meets bedrock. The ice sample contains greenhouse gas bub- bles that hold clues to climate and atmospheric history dating back more than 800,000 years. The ice core shows a continuous re- cord of the Earth’s climate as far back as 1.2 million years. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, chair of the ice core science consortium at the U of M, was part of the team to drill the 2,800-metre sample. “We’re pretty excited about it and can’t wait to get working on (re- searching) it,” she said from Den- mark Thursday. The project was 10 years in the making, Dahl-Jensen said. The team began using radars in 2014 to identify the spots likely to contain the old ice. Drilling began in 2019. Over a period of four seasons (the team did not drill during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic), a special drill designed in Europe went through the ice sheet metre by metre to reach the bedrock. Dahl-Jensen, her team and a broad- er group of scientists will soon begin extracting greenhouse gases trapped in bubbles within the ice sample, which consists of one-metre blocks that will be transported to Denmark from Antarctica in insulated foam containers. By studying the ice and gases, re- searchers hope to learn about the past to help the future. “Right now we are warming the climate because we are increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases, and in that way we are going exactly into a climate situation that reminds very much about the climate about 1.2 million years ago,” she said. “So by looking back in time, we get a snapshot on the climate situation that might be valuable for us in under- standing what’s going on right now.” The project was co-ordinated by the Institute of Polar Sciences of the Na- tional Research Council of Italy and funded by the European Commission with support from national partners across Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. In Spring, Dahl-Jensen and a differ- ent team will undertake a similar pro- ject in Nunavut, drilling thousands of metres below the ice to retrieve cores in order to learn about what Canada’s climate once was. The analysis will eventually take place at the Univer- sity of Alberta. nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca U of M researcher among scientists studying world’s longest ice sample NICOLE BUFFIE PNRA-IPEV The ice-core storage cave in Antarctica. Core samples, as pictured below, are cut into one-metre blocks and sent to Denmark for further research. Ottawa credits MMF, funding plan for Michif resurgence THE number of people able to have a conversation in a traditional Indigen- ous language across Canada has in- creased 45 per cent since the federal government allocated funding directly to Métis nations for classes and pro- gramming. Taleeb Noormohamed, parliament- ary secretary to the Canadian Herit- age Minister Pascale St-Onge, said the Michif language has seen a resurgence because of the Manitoba Métis Federa- tion’s efforts. “That shows that these types of ef- forts, these types of initiatives, have a profound impact,” Noormohamed told reporters at a Winnipeg news confer- ence Thursday to formally announce the funding and provide an update on the program. The Liberal government announced a new model to support Métis languages in April 2023 that directly allocates the funds to the Manitoba Métis Fed- eration, allowing them to implement a language strategy that addresses their unique priorities and redistribute re- sources to Red River Métis organiza- tions and community groups. Andrew Carrier, minister of French and Michif language protection for the MMF, said there are fewer than 1,000 people in Manitoba who still speak Michif and the funding will support the language’s advancement. “With the help of the federal govern- ment we’re able to give the Michif lan- guage a chance to survive and to pros- per,” he said. Michif is a combination of French nouns and Cree verbs and is spoken by Métis people in several provinces and territories across Canada. Currently the MMF has funded class- es through community organizations and the universities of Winnipeg and Manitoba, with plans to expand its of- ferings to school divisions. Noormohamed said one of the chal- lenges with funding for language edu- cation in the past was that it had been done on an ad hoc, short-term basis that didn’t give organizations the time and capacity to plan programs properly. “So this model, I think, is one that is transformative in that regard, and be- cause it is driven by the federation it al- lows a lot more planning and program development,” he said. The MMF currently has a request for proposals on its website for individuals and communities to apply for funds to enhance Michif education. In October 2023 the federal gov- ernment announced more than $15.3 million over five years to the MMF to support the revitalization efforts of the language. nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca NICOLE BUFFIE No delay on Trump sentence: Supreme Court WASHINGTON — A divided Supreme Court on Thursday rejected presi- dent-elect Donald Trump’s bid to delay his sentencing in his hush money case in New York. The court’s order clears the way for Judge Juan M. Merchan to impose a sentence Friday on Trump, who was convicted in what prosecutors called an attempt to cover up a $130,000 hush- money payment to porn actor Stormy Daniels. Trump has denied any liaison with Daniels or any wrongdoing. Merchan has said he will not give Trump jail time, fines or probation. But Trump’s attorneys have argued that evidence used in the Manhattan trial violated last summer’s Supreme Court ruling giving Trump broad immunity from prosecution over acts he took as president. At the least, they have said, the sen- tencing should be delayed while their appeals play out to avoid distracting Trump during the presidential transi- tion. Prosecutors pushed back, saying there’s no reason for the court to take the “extraordinary step” of intervening in a state case now. Trump’s attorneys haven’t shown that an hour-long virtual hearing would be a serious disruption, and a pause would likely mean pushing the case past the Jan. 20 inauguration, creating a years-long delay in senten- cing if it happens at all. Trump’s attorneys went to the jus- tices after New York courts refused to postpone sentencing, including the state’s highest court on Thursday. Judges in New York have found that the convictions on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to personal matters rather than Trump’s official acts as president. Daniels says she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. He denies it. Trump’s attorneys called the case politically motivated, and they said sentencing him now would be a “grave injustice” that threatens to disrupt the presidential transition as the Repub- lican prepares to return to the White House. Trump is represented by D. John Sauer, his pick to be the solicitor gen- eral, who represents the government before the high court. Sauer also argued for Trump in the separate criminal case charging him with trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election that resulted in the Supreme Court’s immunity opinion. Defence attorneys cited that opinion in arguing some of the evidence used against him in the hush money trial should have been shielded by presiden- tial immunity. That includes testimony from some White House aides and so- cial media posts made while he was in office. The decision comes a day after Jus- tice Samuel Alito confirmed that he took a phone call from Trump the day before the president-elect’s lawyers filed their emergency motion before the high court. The justice said the call was about a clerk, not any upcoming or current cases. — The Associated Press ;