Manitoba plans to send as many as 300 spinal-surgery patients to Fargo

Patients who've waited a year or more for surgery will be selected as part of effort to reduce surgery backlog

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Manitoba will send as many as 300 patients awaiting spinal surgery to Fargo, N.D. to get their operations — and may send joint-surgery patients south as well.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/01/2022 (828 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba will send as many as 300 patients awaiting spinal surgery to Fargo, N.D. to get their operations — and may send joint-surgery patients south as well.

The province has reached a deal with Sanford Health, a non-profit health-care system based in the Dakotas, to conduct surgeries on spinal patients who have already waited more than a year, enduring chronic pain and deteriorating mobility in the process.

“We acknowledge the suffering. We acknowledge the waits,” said Dr. Ed Buchel, the provincial surgery lead for Manitoba Shared Health, adding there was no option to send patients elsewhere in Canada because every province is struggling to meet the health-care demands of the Omicron surge.

Dreamstime/TNS
Some suggestions included engaging rural doctors, opthamologists and gynaecologists, and moving some surgeries and diagnostic procedures outside of the hospital setting.
Dreamstime/TNS Some suggestions included engaging rural doctors, opthamologists and gynaecologists, and moving some surgeries and diagnostic procedures outside of the hospital setting.

To read more of this story first reported by CBC News, click here

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