MAHCP is calling on our provincial government to develop and execute a provincial allied health workforce plan to address staffing and workload issues and invest in a strong, sustainable system for the future.
Manitoba’s healthcare system is still struggling to recruit and retain skilled allied health professionals. Patient volumes — in diagnostics, mental health, home care, emergency settings, and more — have surged, but staffing has not kept pace.
Unsustainable vacancy rates have resulted in prolonged levels of overtime, eroded morale, and negative impacts on patient care, creating circumstances in which Manitobans find themselves waiting longer and travelling further from home to access the care they need.
Reporting by the Winnipeg Free Press revealed that “Shared Health — which is tasked with planning future health-care staffing requirements in Manitoba— has no ‘responsive records’ to show workforce modelling or a forecast of future staffing needs.”
Here are just some examples of the impact of allied health staffing shortages:
- Emergency medical response times are sometimes exceeding one hour in rural Manitoba due to continued understaffing of paramedics. Approximately 200 rural paramedic positions remain vacant.
- The provincial NDP government committed to adding 200 net new rural paramedics by 2027. Its last public update shows the government is nowhere near that number, with only 41 net new paramedics added by April 2026.
- Manitoba’s respiratory therapists are critically short-staffed and overworked. At least 50 more respiratory therapists are needed to keep patients breathing in Winnipeg’s emergency rooms and ICU beds, while 40 additional RTs are required in other community hospitals and programs across the province. In 2026, only ten students finished the RT bachelor’s program at the University of Manitoba. It’s not enough to keep up with retirements, let alone growing patient needs.
- Vacancy rates for technical laboratory staff have increased to 20% in the last two years, with many current professionals eligible to retire. Shortages are particularly acute in rural hospitals, where Manitobans have limited locations to rely on, often needing their local hospitals for lab services. Diagnostic staff, including lab, are required to keep rural emergency rooms open.
- In home care, the number of community home-care case coordinators has remained static for years. In 2026, Manitoba currently has 106 coordinators, a gain of only one net new coordinator since 2019. Meanwhile, their caseloads, their workloads, and the complexity and needs of their clients have all increased substantially. The shortage of home care coordinators contributes to long wait times for client assessments and services.
- More than 80,000 Manitobans are currently waiting for an MRI, a CT scan, or an ultrasound. Wait times for these important, specialized diagnostic tests have increased significantly in the last two years, while the vacancy among the imaging technologists who perform them have also increased.
- Wait times for MRI and CT scans in Manitoba are the highest in Canada, according to a 2025 Canadian Institute of Health Information report. Manitoba patients waited for CT scans four times longer than the national average, and 2.5 times longer for MRIs.
- As of June 2026, demand for ultrasound testing is growing, but the number of technologists isn’t, driving up wait times. According to data from Shared Health, Manitoba had 128 ultrasound technologists in 2023 and 129 in 2025, with 17 vacant positions. As of December 2025, 18 MRI technologist positions were vacant out of 104, a 17% vacancy rate.
In May 2024, more than two-thirds of respondents to an MAHCP member survey told us they were seriously considering leaving their job, with many also saying they were seriously considering leaving health care altogether.
Although MAHCP made some headway in addressing long-standing wage disparities for some of our member disciplines during the last round of collective bargaining, wages for many high demand allied health professions still lag behind other jurisdictions. Manitoba is not competitive.