Shared Health recently notified MAHCP that they are discontinuing the COVID-19 Pandemic Responsiveness Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) effective November 23, 2024. This agreement, finalized with MAHCP in December 2020, provides monetary incentives to frontline health-care professionals working in adult and pediatric intensive care units (ICUs), as well as in personal care homes and hospital units experiencing COVID outbreaks.
MAHCP is advocating against this decision.
According to Shared Health, the MOA is no longer needed, as our “healthcare system has stabilized” and the impact of COVID has “shifted considerably”. This is simply not true. COVID outbreaks are still being declared weekly and the annual respiratory virus season is ramping up. Meanwhile Manitoba’s health-care system remains critically understaffed, with very real and ongoing impacts for patients and staff.
Despite inequities of the MOA, it has served to retain health-care professionals working in Manitoba’s high-intensity ICUs and some other designated areas experiencing significant staffing issues.
Here are just some of the challenges Manitoba’s health-care system is facing:
- Diagnostic testing is severely backlogged, with skyrocketing wait times for critical MRIs, CT scans, mammograms and other tests.
- Staffing issues persist for most allied health professions, and 65% of allied health professionals say they have seriously considered leaving their job in the past year.
- Allied health professionals are overworked and burning out, with 90% saying workload has increased compared to five years ago.
- Respiratory therapists (RT’s), who provide life-saving breathing support, are essential to keeping ICUs, emergency rooms, urgent care centres and operating rooms running. As workloads and patient volumes increase during the fall/winter, we must retain RT’s.
“Ultimately, the decision to terminate the MOA puts critical services that patients and families rely on at risk. Health-care leaders should be doing everything they can to support and retain specialized allied health professionals.”
JASON LINKLATER
MAHCP President