Our province is working on an agreement to send some Manitobans down to Fargo, North Dakota for spinal surgery.

Manitoba's Diagnostic and Surgical Recovery Task Force made the announcement Wednesday afternoon, as part of an update on how it plans to tackle the backlog of surgeries and procedures facing our province. The task force was launched in December.

The agreement is with Sanford Health in Fargo and the plan is to provide spinal surgeries as part of Manitoba's Out-of-Province Medical Referrals program. This measure is intended to reduce the wait-list for Manitobans as the province builds its own capacity. Services will be offered later this year as capacity allows. Eligible individuals will be referred by their care provider, typically for conditions such as spinal stenosis and chronic degenerative disc disease.

Dr. Ed Buchel is surgical lead on the task force steering committee. He says not all spinal surgery patients will qualify.

"It's not our most complex cases, it's not our outpatient cases that we still have capacity to do, it's this group in the middle," he explains.

He notes currently there might be a few hundred individuals in Manitoba that would fall within this group. These are individuals who have been asked if they would be okay with heading to Fargo. They would be transported safely and then probably stay in hospital for anywhere from a few days to a week. After that, they would be ready to undergo rehabilitation and would be transferred back to Manitoba where their surgeon would follow through with their care plan as identified prior to surgery.

The cost will be covered by Manitoba as part of allocations in Budget 2021. Health Minister Audrey Gordon says a start time has not yet been determined.

"We're all going through omicron right now at different stages," she notes. "And we want to ensure that both our province as well as the locations that Sanford serves is able to handle the needs of both respective communities."

Meanwhile, the task force announced several other initiatives on Wednesday. Our province is developing an agreement with Maples Surgical Centre and other local partners to increase gynecology surgeries. Nearly 3,000 women are currently waiting for care and almost two-thirds of these procedures can be done through day surgery. This program will begin in early February and significantly decrease the wait for many patients, notes Gordon.

In Manitoba, the screening tool currently used for colon cancer requires the client to have an endoscopy to confirm their diagnosis. This must be done in an operating room, which requires staffing and other resources. Manitoba is shifting to fecal immunochemical test screening, which provides more accurate results and also reduces the need for endoscopic procedures. This will provide more timely diagnosis and support better outcomes for individual clients. It will also free up operating room space for other procedures by decreasing the number of endoscopies by approximately 10 to 15 per cent per year once fully implemented.

The Manitoba government is also preparing a plan to train and hire up to 13 new anesthesia clinical assistants (ACA) positions across the province over the next three years. Anesthesia is fundamental to effective, safe and efficient medical procedures. ACAs allow anesthesiologists to increase their efficiency by being able to delegate and observe care simultaneously for more than one patient. This investment will double the number of ACAs currently working in Manitoba.

One of the significant challenges the task force has identified is the lack of a verified, centralized wait-list for most diagnostic and surgical procedures. Beginning in February, the task force will reach out to hundreds of patients to get a more complete picture of who is waiting for care, the procedures required and other key information. This will help inform the task force's priorities as well as its future updates to Manitobans, including an online dashboard expected to launch in the coming months.