Banner-carrying protesters in Vancouver join Extinction Rebellion protest

New beds fill gaps, won’t fix health-care woes

The NDP government is finally putting more money into one of the most important solutions to Manitoba’s emergency-room crisis: getting patients who no longer require acute-care treatment out of hospitals and into more appropriate care.

The province is adding 103 new community-based spaces in Winnipeg for patients who no longer need to be in hospital but still need somewhere safe to go.

That’s a good investment. It’s also an acknowledgement of a problem that has been clogging Manitoba’s hospitals for years.

About 600 patients are occupying hospital beds on an average day even though they no longer require acute care treatment. They are waiting for personal-care-home beds, housing, home supports, mental-health services or other community-based options.

Manitoba to open India trade office

Instead of being stationed on Broadway, a Manitoba government employee will set up their own office — in India.

The New Democrats will today announce their plans to open a trade office in the South Asia country.

“We’re going to be continuing to expand our global presence,” said Business Minister Jamie Moses.

Government has slated $150,000 for the trade office, including the representative’s salary. A request for proposal will be posted online Tuesday, Moses said.

Manitoba pharmacists push for increased role in administration of vaccines

Manitoba’s public health officials are preparing for influenza season to peak earlier than usual amid concerns about declining uptake for flu and COVID-19 vaccinations.

While the season started early in some provinces, including Ontario and B.C., Dr. Brent Roussin, Manitoba’s chief public health officer, said it’s too soon to conclusively say if the same will happen here.

“But certainly seeing what’s around us and seeing an uptick (in cases) here, it’s making a concern it might be an early year,” he told the Free Press on Thursday.

Manitoba’s flu season usually peaks in late December, with the vaccination campaign continuing into the new year.

Fantastical, moving graphic memoir explores addictions, organ procurement and more

At the heart of Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic Frankenstein and its many pop culture adaptations is the scene in the mad scientist’s lab where Victor Frankenstein, helped by a bolt of lightning, animates the grotesque figure made out of human and animal parts lying on his anatomy table.

As much as Shelley’s novel is a philosophical investigation into the desire of modern science to create new life, it is also a gruesome window into the clandestine European trade in graveyard and battlefield body snatching that fuelled early 19th-century anatomy research, medical training and public dissection theatres.

Whose bodies ended up on the slab to advance medical knowledge? As Montreal-based artist Arizona O’Neill explains in her captivating first graphic narrative, it was inevitably poor, racialized and criminalized bodies that were deemed appropriate for the indignities of public display and dissection in earlier periods.

But what about today? This is the central question driving the story of Opioids & Organs, O’Neill’s beautifully drawn story of coming to terms with her father’s untimely death due to a fentanyl overdose as well as the awful truth that Canada’s post-2015 opioid crisis has greatly increased the number of organs available for donation, mostly from otherwise healthy young men like her father.

Under-fire Olympic composer steps down over past bullying

Stock surges and setbacks for the week ending July 16, 2021.