The head of Manitoba’s nurses’ union says heavy workloads are leaving patients with “minimum care” as she urges the government to address staffing concerns at a Steinbach hospital. Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson, whose union represents more than 13,000 nurses in the province, said in an interview Friday that “with the patient loads that nurses are carrying, patients are getting the minimum care.” She said the most morally distressing part of the job is “going home at the end of your shift knowing that you did not treat that person as a whole person.” Nurses are educated to provide total care, including looking after patients’ social and psychological needs, Jackson said, but added they can’t do that with the patient loads they’re carrying. Jackson said the union has heard from emergency nurses at Bethesda Regional Health Centre in Steinbach, Man., about a lack of staff to triage patients in a timely manner. “We made a trip out there, and what we discovered was it’s not just the emergency department,” she said. She said the union has since learned of staffing shortages among nurses in the hospital’s medicine units and the Steinbach Community Cancer Program. Nurses in all three areas turned to the union, she said, after they couldn’t escalate the issues with their employer. The union says it has sent two letters on behalf of the medicine and cancer nurses to Premier Wab Kinew, Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara and Southern Health-Santé Sud leaders. It says they follow earlier correspondence about the emergency department. On the hospital’s two medicine units, the union says additional beds opened without more staff. When shifts are short, it says a nurse can be handed seven or eight patients, and sometimes eight or nine. On one of those units, the union says two nurses routinely look after patients with complex needs, including palliative care and complex wound care. If one steps away for a break, it says the other can be left in charge of the entire unit. Nurses at the Steinbach Community Cancer Program, meanwhile, say patient volumes have grown by about 30 per cent over three years without a proportional increase in staff. The union says about 546 overtime hours were logged in the last quarter alone, and that one nurse can be responsible for as many as seven patients receiving treatment. The union is calling for sustainable staffing, mentorship for new nurses including on night shifts, safe break coverage, more administrative support for the cancer program and staffing plans in place before more beds are opened. In a statement, a spokesperson for Southern Health-Santé Sud said the health authority has received correspondence from the union. It said it is working with site leadership, CancerCare Manitoba and union representatives “to better understand and address these concerns collaboratively.” CTV News has reached out to the province for comment. Jackson said nurses “want and need nurse-patient ratios,” which would set the number of patients assigned to each nurse. She said the province is still “a very long way” from implementing them. She said a committee of union, government and employer representatives spent two years developing recommendations, which went to the health minister’s desk in December 2025. An implementation meeting is expected in November, she said. “I had hoped to see nurse-patient ratios rolled out at least in some units and in some areas long before this. So, this has been such a long process, and nurses are getting so frustrated.” For now, Jackson said, the union is in wait-and-see mode, and nurses will decide their next steps after seeing how the government responds. “I can tell you that nurses are not backing down.”
