FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — JANUARY 23, 2025
A new survey of more than 1,400 frontline allied health-care professionals reveals staffing, workload and morale worsened in 2024. The Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals (MAHCP) conducted the online survey in December 2024 as a follow-up to a more extensive survey of its members conducted in May 2024.
“Allied health-care professionals are dedicated to their patients and they understand the system isn’t going to get fixed overnight, but they were hoping for some improvement by now,” said MAHCP President Jason Linklater. “The most troubling result in this survey is the high proportion of members – half or more – who say that staffing, workload and morale are actually getting worse.”
The new survey gauged perceived changes over the course of 2024. In terms of staffing, roughly half (48%) of respondents indicated they had lost people in their department or area in 2024, versus only 11% who said staffing had improved. Perceptions of morale were somewhat starker, with an even higher proportion (59%) stating that morale worsened in 2024; only 8% saw improvement.
The most striking results related to workload challenges, with 62% of respondents saying they are doing more now than at the beginning of 2024, while only two percent have seen a decrease in workload. Full survey results can be found here.
Results of the Manitoba Government’s listening tour, released in November 2024, confirmed that “staffing and strained capacity [are] the driving causes of many issues in the health-care system,” and “efforts for retention of current staff and recruitment of new staff” are needed.
“We know all these issues are linked to staffing, and we also know demand for everything from mental health services to diagnostic tests is only growing,” said Linklater. “Our recent survey results should be a wake-up call: much more needs to be done, and much more quickly, or Manitobans will continue to see negative impacts in high wait times for services like testing, emergency care, mental health and addictions support, and more.”
The Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals (MAHCP) represents more than 7,000 publicly-employed allied health professionals working in more than 50 specialized disciplines in labs, clinics, hospitals, community and long-term care. Our members include paramedics, lab and imaging technologists, respiratory therapists, mental health clinicians, and many more. Allied health is the only public health-care sector without a new collective agreement; their contract expired March 31, 2024.