A provincewide shortage of respiratory therapists threatens to get worse with a wave of retirees on the horizon and an inadequate number of graduates in the pipeline to replace them, warns a union that represents thousands of allied health-care workers in Manitoba.
There are 50 unfilled respiratory therapist positions across Winnipeg’s three acute care centres alone right now, in addition to many more at smaller rural hospitals, according to the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals.
“They’re in a crisis mode,” said Jason Linklater, president of MAHCP. “They’re running from ER to ICU [and] back and they’re having to make decisions about which patient takes precedence in given situations and it’s a huge problem.”
The union — which represents about 7,500 employees working in diagnostics, therapy, rehabilitation, assessment, labs, long-term care and other settings — said recent internal schedules suggests there are presently hundreds of unclaimed respiratory therapist shifts system-wide.
That’s adding strain to respiratory therapists, who clocked almost 90,000 overtime hours in the two past years, MAHCP said in a news release on Tuesday.
A quarter (25 per cent) of respiratory therapy positions at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg are presently vacant, Linklater said. About four in 10 positions are unfilled at the Grace Hospital (42 per cent) and St. Boniface Hospital (36 per cent), respectively, according to MAHCP.
RTs there in ‘dire situations’
Shere Gigolyk has worked at St. Boniface Hospital for 35 years and says many people may not be aware of the critical role respiratory therapists play in acute health situations.
“Usually most people don’t see us in the hospital,” said Gigolyk. “We are only there in the most dire of situations.”
She said there are also advanced practice respiratory therapists doing inter-facility hospital transfers and transporting patients from rural areas.
Some are embedded within the Virtual Emergency Care and Transfer Resource Service, or VECTRS, an emergency care service hub opened by the Progressive Conservatives that provides clinical guidance and patient transport support for health-care staff across Manitoba.
Gigolyk has witnessed how the demands of the job and staffing shortages have evolved in recent years.
“There’s no prioritizing of acuity because everything is at max acuity when you’re looking at the patients that we’re dealing with,” she said.
“A lot of times we’re just trying to figure out how we can get from one critical incident to the other one that’s pending, especially if we don’t have enough staff to be at two critical situations at the same time. So, it can be overwhelming.”
Staffing stagnant: union
The number of respiratory therapists hasn’t improved since before the COVID-19 pandemic — there were 347 in 2019 compared to 346 in 2024, according to MAHCP’s own annual reports.
That staffing hasn’t budged much in several years is even more concerning, Linklater says, when factoring in the ongoing exodus of baby boomers from the workforce and new numbers from Statistics Canada that suggest Winnipeg’s population just topped 850,000.
As of 2023, nearly one in five of the 13,400 respiratory therapists nationwide was over the age of 50, according to StatsCan.
That’s why the federal agency has for several years classified respiratory therapy as a labour category with a “strong risk of shortage” between 2024 and 2033.
StatsCan says that between 2021-23 “demand substantially exceeded labour supply.”
Respiratory therapist vacancy rates are also tied to established baseline staffing ratios that haven’t changed in years in the face of increasing demands, patient acuity and growth in population levels, said Linklater.
“The true vacancy rate is likely much higher,” he said. “The level of investment, particularly when it comes to dealing with staffing, is nowhere near where it needs to be.”
Doubling intake at U of M
The province and the University of Manitoba announced in fall 2024 they would double annual intake for the three-year program to 40 students.
This year’s cohort has 23 students currently in their first year and 21 in their second year of study, according to MAHCP, with only a dozen third-years expected to graduate this spring.
Linklater said that’s not enough to account for retirements and resignations or “make a dent” in vacancy numbers.
Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said the provincial recruitment and retention initiative added 16 respiratory therapists to the system last year, which lost 17 during the final five years of the Tory government.
They said respiratory therapists “have seen improvements through their collective agreement, including increased shift premiums and rural and northern differentials.”
“At the same time, we are focused on awareness, education, and early job connections so more people choose this profession and build long-term careers in Manitoba,” Asagwara said in a statement.
‘People are moving on’
Linklater called on the province to implement those existing ICU, emergency and urgent care premiums — something respiratory therapists had to go to arbitration to get and still don’t have, according to Gigolyk.
“It’s kind of insulting … almost demeaning for us to have to go to arbitration for us to get compensation for something that was negotiated in a contract,” she said.
“I’m not a big complainer … but it was negotiated … it hasn’t been followed through, and we’re seeing the results of it. People are retiring, people are moving on.”
The Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals says vacancy rates for respiratory therapists at some Winnipeg hospitals have hit ‘dangerous levels.’
