Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - September 18, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 18, 2025 ● ASSOCIATE EDITOR, NEWS: STACEY THIDRICKSON 204-697-7292 ● CITY.DESK@FREEPRESS.MB.CA ● WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM SECTION B CONNECT WITH WINNIPEG’S NO. 1 NEWS SOURCE ▼ CITY ● BUSINESS Hospital fills two of three additional tech positions for new diagnostics suite Wait times for CT scans at St. B soar W AIT times for CT scans at St. Boniface Hospital have soared, just as the central-Winnipeg facility prepares to open a diagnostics lab in its soon-to-be-unveiled redevel- oped emergency department. The project is expected to triple the size of the emergency department; a CT scanner and X-ray machines have been installed to provide testing on site. Shared Health has provided funding to staff the equivalent of nearly three additional full-time positions to operate the new diagnostics suite. On Wednes- day, it said two of the three positions had been filled, and that interviews are being held for the third. “The fact that the government has funded new positions, and that Shared Health is filling those positions, is good news,” said Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals. “Too often, new beds or capacity is added without con- sidering the increased demands on diagnostics staff,” he said in an email Wednesday. “However, there are a limited num- ber of CT and X-ray technologists in Manitoba, so I do wonder where those hires are coming from, and if Shared Health is robbing Peter to pay Paul and causing shortages elsewhere,” said Linklater. The latest figures provided by the Manitoba government showed 20,713 Manitobans were waiting for a CT scan as of June 2025 — a number greater than during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic backlog. While Manitoba’s overall annual median wait time for CT scans has dropped from 16 weeks in 2020 to nine weeks in 2025, it remains higher than the maximum wait time of 8.5 weeks recommended by the Canadian Associ- ation of Radiologists. At St. Boniface, the monthly medi- an wait time spiked from eight weeks in January, to 18 weeks in June. That month, 3,297 people were awaiting scans at St. Boniface, the data shows. In an interview Tuesday, Linklater said the issue is driven, in part, by a lack of technologists certified to oper- ate CT scanners. The provincewide va- cancy rate for CT techs may be as high as 20 per cent as wait times for scans have skyrocketed, he said. “That’s essentially what it boils down to. There just aren’t enough,” he said. “Human resources workforce plan- ning is an essential part that we’ve been talking about for so long and we still see it not happening, and I think people find that deflating.” The union leader said training, re- cruitment and retention are critical to staffing up diagnostics labs. “Shared Health has much more work to do to train and recruit more imaging technologists. At a minimum, they should be sponsoring people to take the specialized training needed, which they stopped doing for some reason, despite spiking vacancy rates and wait times.” Previously, Shared Health offered education support for X-ray technolo- gists. It covered the cost to have them trained to operate CT scanners. Linkla- ter believes that funding recently end- ed, although he did not know the date. Shared Health said it wasn’t able to answer that question Wednesday. Linklater called for new recruitment and retention incentives to reward tech- nologists for working in emergency de- partments. — with files from Carol Sanders tyler.searle@freepress.mb.ca TYLER SEARLE MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS FILES The redevelopment project is expected to triple the size of St. Boniface Hospital’s emergency department. Statistician interested in public health, from preventing opioid deaths to addressing vaccine hesitancy Manitoban hopes being a Rhodes Scholar can help her save lives AMY Mann is one of the unlucky teen- agers whose Grade 12 year was dis- rupted by COVID-19, over and over and over again. Mann, now a 21-year-old, recalled feeling incredibly frustrated about Manitoba public health officials’ un- clear explanations related to moving students in and out of remote learning in 2020-21. “I didn’t understand why schools were staying closed when the evidence suggested there was no or limited transmission,” she told the Free Press. “And bars were open — that really upset me.” Five years later, the high-achiever is preparing to pack her bags for the U.K. to study the intersection of statistics, public health and the social sciences on a prestigious international scholarship. Mann was named a 2025 Rhodes Scholar, and she’s the only born-and- raised Mani- toban in the incoming co- hort. The Class of 2025 encom- passes just more than 100 recipients who are slated to pursue fully funded gradu- ate studies at the University of Oxford. The group represents 29 nationalities and 73 post-secondary institutes, including the University of Toronto. Mann enrolled in U of T after gradu- ating from both the Pembina Trails School Division and University of Win- nipeg Collegiate — the downtown cam- pus on which she learned to practise social distancing. The young statistician said she spent much of her high school career doing homework at public libraries in her hometown. “People definitely underestimate Manitoba. I’m proud to be from here,” said the U of T alum who returned to Winnipeg over the summer to spend time with her family after completing a statistics-related program (her official degree is a bachelor of science). Mann originally entered university with a plan to become a physicist, but she said she quickly realized her love of sorting and coding data could assist with evidence-based decision-making to improve the lives of others. She has been a part of research teams that have studied how climate change will affect malaria and the fallout of in- complete record-keeping — also known as “garbage-coded deaths” — in health care and government-run databases. “When we don’t specify what exactly (a patient) died of, it hampers us from understanding epidemics and respond- ing to them,” Mann said. The 21-year-old academic called the worldwide phenomenon that is “bias in mortality data,” a special research in- terest of hers because it is a literal life- or-death issue. Mann likened public health statis- ticians to advocates who have “a kind of moral responsibility” because they analyze datasets to uncover oddities and inequities. Oftentimes, they expose issues that negatively affect the most marginal- ized patients in a society, she said. As far as she is concerned, one of the big- gest problems in 2025 is that decision makers care most about the loudest of critics and they are typically privileged as they know how to speak up and advo- cate for themselves. The Rhodes Scholar said that grow- ing up in a province that continues to grapple with the health consequences of colonialism and intergenerational trauma, including the respective meth and opioid crises, has influenced her greatly. The University of Manitoba’s Natalie Riediger supervised one of her under- graduate research projects. Riediger, an associate professor of food and human nutritional sciences, was one of Mann’s six required ref- erences for her application. She de- scribed the up-and-coming researcher as an “excellent student.” Mann said her studious nature is what made her so irritated about COVID-19-related classroom closures. “Having lived through (a pandemic) makes me a lot more aware of the im- portance of community input and the importance of really thinking about social sciences questions in public health,” she said. Citing that experience and her under- graduate studies, she said the best pub- lic health response to any given issue is “the response that people are OK with and willing to follow.” Mann noted the recent surge in measles, as well as the rise of vaccine hesitancy in Manitoba and outside the Prairies, has sparked her interest. The problem is not that people do not trust science, she said. “They don’t trust scientific institutions, and there’s a real reason for that.” While noting that public health of- ficials were under immense pressure during the height of the COVID-19 pan- demic, the 21-year-old said top-down, “this is how it is” attitudes damaged many citizens’ trust in the discipline. maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca MAGGIE MACINTOSH LOCAL JOURNALISM INITIATIVE REPORTER MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS Amy Mann, 21, was named a 2025 Rhodes Scholar, and she’s the only born-and-raised Manitoban in the incoming cohort. ‘People definitely underestimate Manitoba. I’m proud to be from here’ — Amy Mann ;