New website will let Manitobans see where they stand in waitlists for medical procedures

The Manitoba government is creating a website that tells people where they are in the queue for a medical procedure — a revelation that came only a few hours after it was accused of hiding wait-time data.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said in an interview the centralized waitlist system was announced earlier than planned to help show Manitobans the government is actively improving the health-care system. 

While Asagwara was tight-lipped on details, including the timeline, the minister said patients have been asking for more insight into the time they're waiting for care. 

"I want the information to be up-to-date. I want Manitobans to have a clear picture of where they are in the waitlist."

Asagwara revealed the news just hours after the Progressive Conservative Opposition demanded the NDP government come clean on surgical wait times.

A government website revealing these times hadn't been updated since August of last year, right before the election campaign that resulted in the NDP taking office.

Surgical wait times shrouded

Tory health critic Kathleen Cook accused the government of hiding the consequences of its decision last fall to shut down the surgical task force, which may have led some patients to wait longer for surgeries and diagnostic tests than planned, she alleged.

"They've eliminated Manitobans' ability to access surgical procedures, and now they are hiding the impacts of that reckless cut," Cook told a news conference Friday morning. 

"It's impossible for Manitobans to judge the impact of that decision without the data, and that's what the NDP is banking on."

But within three hours of the Tories complaining publicly, the government upgraded the website.

Asagwara said the timing is simply a coincidence. 

"The updated information was received by my office late yesterday afternoon with the plan, like I said, to update the data today," the minister said.

Cook said she finds Asagwara's explanation to be an "interesting coincidence."

The Roblin MLA recalled how the website was scrubbed entirely last fall, but was restored the day after the Winnipeg Free Press reported on its deletion. Premier Wab Kinew stood up in the legislature and apologized, saying the information should have never been removed.

"I would say [Friday] is an early indicator that we as an Opposition are really going to have to stay on top of the NDP government when it comes to transparency and accountability," Cook said, "because this is twice now with the wait times data that they've only been transparent when called out for it and that's troubling to me."

The updated wait-time data goes back 13 months and shows the median waits for various procedures, including hip and knee surgeries, cataract surgeries, MRIs and ultrasounds.

Meanwhile, the government is retiring a dashboard from the now-defunct surgical and diagnostic task force, created to reduce the backlog in surgeries and diagnostic tests stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, which presented some of this data using bar graphs and charts.

While most of the data presented is the same, there are some differences: for example, the updated website doesn't date as far back as 2019 for median wait times.

Going forward, Asagwara said the government would provide "regular updates" on the surgical wait times.

The Union Station MLA attributed the five-month delay in updating the website to the time and energy it took to disband the surgical task force and understand the work completed and decisions made.

While the task force successfully eliminated some waitlists, it was chastised by critics, including the NDP, for a lack of government oversight and for sending patients out of province as it built up capacity in the public health-care system.

Cook continued Friday to fault the province for abandoning the task force's work without first ensuring local surgical capacity had been sufficiently expanded.

Asagwara said the government would announce more details in the future on its new platform for waitlist information.

The website will include a patient's place in the waitlist for one or more procedures. As it stands, different surgical offices maintain their own lists and patients often don't know where they stand, the minister said.