New data shows wait times for home care assessments in Winnipeg have been stagnant for the past five years, and advocates say those delays have a ripple effect across the entire health-care system.

The median wait time for a home care assessment in the Winnipeg health region from 2021 to 2025 ranged from 14 to 16 days, according to data from the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority. The average wait time in the same period was 26 to 27 days.

“For people who are waiting 16 days [or] 27 days, that can be a lifetime in terms of their own personal care,” said Connie Newman, executive director of the Manitoba Association of Senior Communities.

Home care helps seniors maintain their independence and stay out of the hospital, she said.

“There are people that cannot be discharged from hospital because they need in-home supports, and many older people today do not have family in the same city.”

Newman says more people should be trained to conduct assessments.

Anyone who wants to access home care in Winnipeg must first call an intake line, which sends their request to the home care office nearest to their residence before they’re assigned a case co-ordinator, a WRHA spokesperson said in a written statement.

There are 277 case co-ordinators in the province who review and prioritize referrals before connecting with clients or their families to set up appointments for an in-person assessment, the spokesperson said.

The WRHA spokesperson said the wait times reflected in the data didn’t change much because “they are dependent on the volume of clients waiting that we have at any given time, which has also remained consistent.”

Wait times can vary from one area to another and are also impacted by the volume and complexity of cases at any given time, the spokesperson said.

The data shows the maximum number of clients waiting for a home care assessment by the WRHA dropped by roughly five per cent, from 574 to 545, between 2021 and 2025.

The minimum number of people waiting increased by more than 30 per cent in the same period, from 363 to 476.

Shared Health, Manitoba’s provincial health authority, first released the information to the Winnipeg Free Press based on a freedom of information request.

The number of home care clients being served by the WRHA dropped slightly between the 2021-22 and 2024-25 fiscal years, from about 18,000 to 17,850, another spokesperson said.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara says although wait times for assessments haven’t budged, the demand has risen.

“We know that we need to hire and train and retain folks in home care, and build up the workforce to make sure that we can bring those wait times down and get home care to people as quickly as possible,” Asagwara said at an unrelated news conference Wednesday.

‘Increased and complex workload‘

Jason Linklater, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals, says the number of case co-ordinators has “remained static for many years.”

“That’s a problem in the face of [the] increased and complex workload that they have,” he told CBC News.

Staffing levels haven’t increased to match the need for the assessments, Linklater said. The association represents 106 of the 277 case co-ordinators in the province, which is only one more than the 105 they represented in 2019, he said.

“They do the full scope of ensuring a patient gets what they need while remaining in the home instead of a hospital or a personal care home or something like that,” Linklater said.

From 2021 to 2025, the number of Manitobans aged 65 and older increased from about 229,000 to 260,000, which is an increase of more than 13 per cent, according to Statistics Canada population estimates.

Manitoba’s home care numbers need to grow to match the rise, Linklater said.

Case co-ordinators are part of “the bigger plan to make sure hospitals are being used for what hospitals should be used for,” he said.

Linklater said he wants the province to engage with front-line workers to come up with solutions for the long wait times.

The province should look at “everything, from staffing numbers, wait times [and] the length of time it takes for a patient to get referred to a specific service,” he said.

“Putting out fires as they pop up is not the way to address it.”