Doctors and residents in northern and rural Manitoba say health care in their communities must be a federal election priority this year, as emergency rooms continue to close and patients travel farther and longer for care.
The emergency room at Morris General Hospital, 60 kilometres south of Winnipeg, closed indefinitely in September 2023. It’s one of several rural Manitoba ERs to shutter in recent years due to health-care worker shortages.
“You can go there with somebody half dying, and all it’s got is a thing on the door: The emergency’s closed,” said Eileen Klassen, 78, who lives down the road from the hospital.
“It’s not the doctors or the nurses. They work hard.”
Klassen counts herself lucky because after the ER closed, …