The Dauphin Regional Health Centre saw the largest spending on private agency nurses of any single health care facility in the Prairie Mountain Health (PMH) region, Manitoba NDP leader Wab Kinew says, indicating 10 months after Health Minister Audrey Gordon promised the PCs would reduce spending on private agency nurses, new documents show spending has continued to increase in the region.

“The best care at the bedside, comes from nurses who know our communities and our families,” Kinew said. “The PCs said they would decrease reliance on agency nurses, but they’ve done the opposite. It’s clearly Premier Stefanson’s plan to create a crisis in public health care so she can spend millions on private options like agency nurses.”

The NDP released documents that show the PC government spent an additional $24 million on for-profit, private agency nurses in the PMH region from August 2022 to February 2023, for a monthly average of $3.5 million. This is up from a monthly average of $2 million in 2022 and over four times the $800,000 monthly average spent from 2019 to mid-2021.

Previous NDP Freedom of Information Requests show the PCs spent $24 million on agency nurses in PMH from January 2019 to May 2021, and $10 million from February 2022 to June 2022. This means the PCs have spent the same amount in seven months that they previously spent over the course of nearly two-and-a-half years.

“Families in Westman want a government that fixes public health care and makes smart investments,” Kinew said. “Our Manitoba NDP team will reset the relationship with nurses to stop them from leaving the system in the first place, and we’ll bring back the nurses that left under Brian Pallister and Premier Stefanson. We’ll make nursing a great job again for the people of Westman and deliver the best quality of care at the bedside.”