Posted July 31, 2025
Imagine living with Parkinson’s disease and moving to a more accessible home (just 10 minutes from your previous address), only to discover that your four daily home care appointments won’t be available to you for FIVE weeks.
Then imagine your 72-year-old spouse, who is still employed full-time, will be serving as your full-time caregiver, providing personal care such as getting you up and dressed in the morning; preparing your meals; putting on compression socks; undressing you and putting you to bed; disconnecting and connecting your urinary catheter, and helping you shower.
Then, when your home care is finally reinstated, you learn that the new schedule includes a morning home care appointment at 9:45 AM and a bedtime appointment at 9 PM, neither of which are ideal.
This is today’s Winnipeg Free Press story, and someone’s real experience. This is not dignified, accessible care.
“If a resident moves to a new zone of home care coverage, that is no reason for their care to be delayed, certainly not by five weeks,” said Noah Schulz, Provincial Director, Manitoba Health Coalition.
Recent media coverage has highlighted significant challenges related to the WRHA’s newly-implemented centralized scheduling system, related assignment delays, and a resulting increase in missed home care appointments. View coverage:
- New Winnipeg home-care scheduling system described as ‘disruptive,’ causing ‘absolute chaos’
- ‘Absolute chaos’: distraught nurses say WRHA’s home-care scheduling overhaul a disaster for them, patients – Winnipeg Free Press
- Home-care scheduling chaos worsening – Winnipeg Free Press
- Missed visit ‘can be a life and death thing’ – Winnipeg Free Press
Home care is a vital service, and right now, some of those who need support are struggling to access it, which weighs heavy on the health-care aides, home care workers, and home care case coordinators in our system who are desperately trying to juggle it all.
“Patients are suffering due to the home care staffing crisis and a failure to properly communicate across the system and schedule care appropriately. To ensure continuity of care, adequate staffing and scheduling systems must be in place to effectively connect health care providers to patients where and when they are needed.”
Manitobans should not have to go to the media just to get attention to solve a care crisis, nor to generate the action needed to address the systemic challenges health-care professionals face. Imagine if you didn’t have a partner and advocate like the individual in today’s story. Where would you be then?
This is not the way public health care should work.
The Manitoba Health Coalition (MHC) is a non-profit, non-partisan health care advocacy organization established in 2018 to work for the preservation and expansion of universal, public health care.