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Winnipeg Free Press

Dropping the ball on home care

Opinion There are moments where one realizes just how badly a situation has deteriorated. Take home care in Manitoba, for example. For months, health-care providers have been sounding the alarm that the system was breaking down. 'Absolute chaos', blared one Free Press headline from April; Home care chaos in store, workers say, declared another in mid-July. And now, to close out the month, the sad tale of Seth Wigderson and his wife, Julie Guard, who were forced to go without important home care for five weeks … because they moved to a new home a 10-minute drive from their old one. MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS Health, Seniors and Long-Term Care Minister Uzoma Asagwara It's the sort of thing that makes you take stock of just how bad the situation has become: how does a move to a new location slightly further away completely upend the accessibility of home-care services? It should have been a simple matter: just call the care provider, provide a change of address, and that's it. And the upsetting thing is, it did indeed seem to be that easy — once the provider felt properly motivated to do it. 'Guard said it was only after speaking to a Free Press reporter on Tuesday, who began making phone calls to the government, that home care called her Tuesday night to say workers would be assigned to fulfil the new schedule,' this paper reported in its July 31 story. We can't know for sure why there was such a long and significant disruption in services. Certainly, home-care providers in Manitoba have spoken repeatedly about the backlog they face as a result of understaffing. But given how quickly a little poking around by a reporter changed things for two Winnipeggers, it certainly looks like a situation where no one felt much of an urge to help Guard and Wigderson until they thought it might make them look bad. That cannot be the way this works. For their part, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said the move had nothing to do with the loss of service and that 'the system failed this family and that is unacceptable.' Asagwara is correct, but the buck stops with them. Asagwara has held the health portfolio for going on two years, and repairing the province's flailing health-care system has supposedly been a major priority of the Wab Kinew government since it captured the legislature for the NDP. Yet, after all that time, not only does the system seem to be struggling in all the same major ways, it continues to struggle to handle simple things, too. Wednesdays What's next in arts, life and pop culture. The salt in the wound here is the indication that Manitobans are in for more of the same: Asagwara's office is supposedly 'looking into the matter,' and will ask the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority to prevent something like this from happening again. It's not a useful request, because you can only demand so much of an overstretched system. 'Don't let it happen again,' only goes so far when saying that is not followed by more people in the offices to take the calls and handle the details, or more people to do the actual home-care work. And yes, it's true those people will not show up trained and ready overnight. But it's not about 'overnight' — it should have been done by now, at least to a degree better than this one. It's time for Asagwara — and for that matter, the premier — to come clean about where the situation really stands with health care and its related services in this province, and what they're actually going to do about it. Or else someone else is going to be in the same spot at Wigderson and Guard. Maybe they already are.