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.
