Surgery uncertainty: How Manitoba’s 4th wave is spoiling the new premier’s backlog-clearing pledge – CBC

Manitoba is postponing more surgeries while Heather Stefanson says work is underway to get more done

Nov 19, 2021

To prepare for an expected surge of COVID-19 patients, Manitoba hospitals are once again postponing some surgeries and other medical procedures.

At the same time, Manitoba Shared Health is trying to whittle away a backlog of postponed surgeries and diagnostic procedures that started piling up 20 months ago, at the start of the pandemic.

You don’t need a master’s degree in health administration to see how postponing surgeries complicates the task of getting more of them done.

But this is the situation Heather Stefanson’s Progressive Conservative government finds itself in only weeks after the new premier was sworn in.

The fourth wave of COVID-19 is stubbornly sticking around. It’s currently infecting more than 140 Manitobans every day on average and sending a fraction of them weeks later to hospital, where they require the attention of medical staff who might otherwise be deployed to surgical and diagnostic units.

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-covid-surgeries-delay-1.6254570