Medical directors from four Winnipeg community hospitals have issued a stark warning: the city's urgent care and emergency network is on the brink of disintegration, and patient deaths are inevitable without immediate action.
In a confidential March 12 letter to health-care leadership, top doctors at Grace, Victoria, Seven Oaks, and Concordia hospitals detailed severe physician shortages that force daily high-risk triage decisions.
“We do not want to stand at the bedside of another person who deteriorated due to preventable delays and gaps in care — knowing their outcome would have been different,” the medical directors wrote.
The letter stressed that systemic changes are urgently needed to protect patient safety across Manitoba.
“We are asking for urgent action now to prevent a preventable death and to ensure Manitobans can count on timely, safe, compassionate emergency care when they need it most,” the document stated.
According to the directors, it has become routine for a single physician to run an entire emergency room while simultaneously managing other hospital crises, escalating clinical risks.
“If one of these patients experiences a bad outcome, we will have to answer to their families why this happened, and whether it could have been preventable,” the letter warned.
The document projected a 28.1 percent vacancy rate for emergency physician shifts in April, worsening to a 45 percent shortage at Seven Oaks by summer, making temporary department closures a realistic possibility.
“Overall, we are repeatedly forced to choose who appears sickest — accepting that others may deteriorate while waiting, may leave without care, or may return later in extremis.
This generates profound moral distress on all staff and accelerates turnover,” the directors explained.
The authors emphasized that operational conditions must improve immediately to prevent further clinical incidents.
“Another critical incident and patient death are not a question of 'if' but a question of 'when,' unless conditions change,” the letter stated.
The correspondence also raised concerns about Victoria Hospital's planned transition back to a full emergency department by 2027.
“Rebranding without readiness will increase only risk, not patient access,” the directors declared.
Government Response and Physician Concerns
Manitoba Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara responded on June 29, 2026, pointing to a newly implemented one-year, $6 million pilot program designed to stabilize scheduling by offering financial incentives to doctors committing to regular shifts.
“Our priority is making sure that our urgent cares and emergency departments remain open and that patients can count on getting that care when they need it,” Asagwara said.
The minister noted that previous administrative choices had shifted financial resources away from emergency services, creating the current shortages.
“We're seeing the impacts of that today,” Asagwara added.
The province reported that over 80 doctors have signed up for the incentive program so far.
“This is a way for physicians to be retained.
It's also a way for them to be encouraged to increase … their hours of practice in our urgent cares and emergency departments so that we've got more consistent staffing,” Asagwara explained.
Dr. Doug Eyolfson, a physician and former member of Parliament who paused his emergency shifts at Grace Hospital last year, noted that staff have raised workload issues for two years.
“Every day, every doctor took on 20 active patients that were signed over to us that had been there for several days,” said Eyolfson.
He described conflicting administrative demands regarding patient reassessments and processing speeds that complicated emergency care delivery.
“We'd be responsible for reassessing those patients, and then we would also have to see new patients and we would alternately be getting emails to the whole group saying we weren't properly reassessing our long-term patients.
And then, a few days later we'd get an email saying, 'You're not seeing a new patient fast enough,'” Eyolfson stated.
The administrative pressures left frontline emergency medical staff facing highly contradictory expectations.
“We were in a catch-22,” Eyolfson said.
Doctors Manitoba president Dr. Alon Altman acknowledged the long-standing challenges but noted that recent provincial town halls and recruitment efforts represent foundational progress.
“While our ERs and urgent-care centres still have major challenges and unreasonably long wait times, we are seeing foundational steps in the right direction from the health system to improve the situation for doctors and their patients,” Altman said in a statement.
Progressive Conservative health critic Kathleen Cook criticized the current administration, citing recent national data showing that Winnipeg emergency room wait times have reached a 10-year high.
“It's not speculation.
It's from people who know what they're talking about, and it should be raising significant alarm bells within the provincial government,” said Cook regarding the medical directors' letter.
The opposition critic argued that the recorded metrics contradict the provincial government's operational promises.
“This is not what Manitobans were promised when the Kinew NDP said they'd 'fix' health care.
The data shows that the situation is getting worse, not better,” Cook stated.
