The 2008 Manitoba Budget Address

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Healthy Manitobans

Improving health care for Manitobans remains the top priority for our government. Significant steps taken since 1999 include:

• educating and hiring more health professionals;
  
  
• investing to improve facilities and equipment; and
  
  
• introducing new innovations in health delivery.

Mr. Speaker, Budget 2008 continues to move forward on health care with new resources to help our health professionals deliver better care sooner.

The province has made significant investments to train, retain, and attract more health care professionals and these investments have delivered real results for Manitobans. Today there are 235 more doctors working in Manitoba than in 1999. In 2007 alone, Manitoba gained 54 doctors, the highest annual increase on record.

There are 86 more doctors practising in rural Manitoba and 103 more specialists in the province than in 1999.

Mr. Speaker, today’s budget invests $7.2 million in new resources to:

• expand the medical school to 110 training seats;
  
  
• increase specialty training, especially for emergency medicine; and
  
  
• increase support for the International Medical Graduate program.

There are now 1,789 more nurses practising in Manitoba than in 1999. We have attracted 973 nurses to Manitoba through the Nurses Recruitment and Retention Fund, and 265 northern and rural positions have been filled through incentives that encourage new nursing graduates to practise in rural and northern Manitoba.

Budget 2008 moves us closer to our goal of hiring 700 more nurses with new funding to expand nursing training, including 40 more seats. With this increase, Manitoba is training almost three times more nurses annually than in 1999. According to the independent Manitoba Nursing Research Institute, more than 90% of nursing graduates stay and work in Manitoba.

Budget 2008 invests $1.2 million to fund additional nurse practitioner positions for emergency rooms and for primary and acute care settings across the province.

Today’s budget also provides funding to create a first-of-its-kind graduate program to train 12 new Physician Assistants over the next two years.

Over the next four years, the Province will implement a comprehensive strategy to improve the quality of care in Manitoba’s personal care homes – the first upgrade of the guidelines in decades. Budget 2008 provides $3 million to begin hiring additional nurses, health care aides and allied health care workers.

Our government has acted to address concerns with wait times and our policies are delivering results:

• Manitoba leads the nation with a one-week wait for radiation therapy, down from six weeks in the 1990s;
  
  
• the wait time for MRIs has been cut to seven weeks, down from 28;
  
  
• CT wait times have been cut to six weeks, down from 18; and
  
  
• wait times for hip and knee replacements have been cut to 18 weeks, down from 44 weeks.

These results show solid progress, but there is still more to do. Wait time reduction has focussed primarily on the wait between seeing a specialist and receiving treatment. With the support of the federal government, Manitoba is investing $5.8 million to reduce the time between a patient’s family doctor referral and their consultation with a specialist.

We are also providing Regional Health Authorities with new funds for a range of programs, including:

• $2.0 million for provincial laboratories and rural diagnostic imaging;
  
  
• $2.9 million for control of sexually transmitted infections and HIV;
  
  
• $2.3 million for chronic disease prevention initiatives; and
  
  
• $1.8 million for mental health programs.

We will invest more than $20 million to develop a new Western Manitoba regional cancer centre in Brandon. The centre will provide Western Manitoba with chemotherapy, radiation therapy and outpatient care closer to home. Budget 2008 also provides an additional $1.8 million for cancer screening to ensure earlier diagnosis and treatment.

Last fall, we pledged more than $20 million to expand renal health services, including dialysis and prevention education across the province. Mr. Speaker, Budget 2008 moves forward with $2.4 million to expand the availability of dialysis at locations across the province, including Berens River, Gimli, and the Percy E. Moore hospital serving Hodgson and Peguis.

We have committed $40 million to redevelop the Women’s Hospital at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg, creating a new state-of-the-art centre of excellence for women’s health services. Planning is also under way to redevelop the maternity ward at St. Boniface Hospital and create a new South End Birthing Centre.

Mr. Speaker, our government has invested more than $1 billion to improve facilities and equipment since 1999.

We have modernized and expanded more than 90 health care facilities across the province. There are new or renovated hospitals in Winnipeg, Brandon, Swan River, Thompson, The Pas, Pinawa, Gimli, Ste. Anne and Steinbach. The $135 million Health Sciences Centre redevelopment is the largest health facility redevelopment in Manitoba’s history.

In the last year alone, projects totalling more than $45 million were completed, including:

• dialysis expansions in Thompson and The Pas;
  
  
• chemotherapy treatment space in Deloraine and Steinbach;
  
  
• community health facilities in Dauphin and Ilford;
  
  
• a new personal care home in South Winnipeg; and
  
  
• a new residential care centre in Thompson for persons with acquired brain injury.

This work is continuing with:

• construction of a 100-bed personal care home in Neepawa;
  
  
• improvements at the Concordia, Seven Oaks and Victoria hospitals; and
  
  
• redevelopment of the surgical areas of the Ste. Anne Hospital.

One of our priorities has been to modernize outdated and aging facilities in Manitoba. Nowhere was this need greater than the Selkirk Mental Health Centre. I am pleased to announce that the redevelopment is well under way with completion expected later this year. Today’s budget provides new resources for additional front line staff for the centre. These improvements will make a real difference in the lives of those who rely on its services.

Better and faster emergency care is the goal of our investments to upgrade or expand emergency rooms at hospitals around the province including St. Anthony’s Hospital in The Pas, and Seven Oaks, Concordia, and Victoria Hospitals in Winnipeg.

Construction will begin this year on the $5 million redevelopment of the emergency department of the Portage General Hospital. Next year, the $4.5 million renovation and expansion of the emergency department at Bethesda Hospital in Steinbach is scheduled to start.

We have been listening to what doctors and nurses are telling us about emergency rooms, and we are taking action. We have provided funding to more than double the number of training spots for emergency medicine. Building on this, Budget 2008 provides another $1 million in new resources to relieve the pressures on emergency rooms.

Pharmacare is another important way that we maintain affordability for Manitobans by helping to pay part of the medication costs for Manitobans in medical and financial need. Pharmacare is not part of the Canadian medicare system. It is a co-insurance program in which the patient buying the prescription pays part of the cost and the provincial government pays the rest.

According to the Canadian Institute of Health Information, Manitoba provides the best drug coverage in Canada, paying 54% of prescription drug expenditures for Manitobans. We have adopted best practices and expanded the use of generic drugs to control costs. Nonetheless, the cost of this important program continues to grow.

Since 1999, we have added almost 2,000 new drugs to Pharmacare and the average benefit paid has more than doubled. In Budget 2008, Pharmacare costs are projected to rise to $284 million and Pharmacare deductibles will increase by 5% to help offset rising costs. This will mean an increase of between $2 and $6 per month for most Pharmacare families.

The health care system plays an important role in maintaining our health, but we all know that healthy living can contribute significantly to our health and our quality of life. Our government was the first in Canada to create a ministry dedicated to healthy living, health promotion and disease prevention.

Mr. Speaker, Budget 2008 provides new resources to expand our investment in healthy living, including:

• $500,000 for recreation directors to expand recreation opportunities for youth in inner city and other Neighbourhoods Alive Communities;
  
  
• $2.1 million in public school funding to support physical education in grades 11 and 12;
  
  
• a new First Sports Initiative to help more young people participate in sports by providing funding for equipment and supplies; and
  
  
• support for projects like the Southdale Community Centre as part of our $60 million multiyear commitment to fund recreation projects across the province.

Smoking is a serious health risk, and our strategy is to reduce tobacco use across the province by discouraging people, especially young people, from starting to smoke and by encouraging smokers to quit. Today’s budget will make quitting a little easier by exempting non-prescription smoking cessation products from provincial sales tax.

We have made a strong commitment to break the chains of addiction and improve mental health services by investing more than $40 million over the past two years in addictions programming and capital. A new addictions treatment centre is under construction in Thompson and planning is under way to develop a mental health emergency room in Winnipeg – the first of its kind in Canada.