In a Rare Move, Two Manitoba Hospitals Declared Unsafe for Nurses

It was still light out when the attacks occurred. In just forty-five minutes, a slim, dark-haired man wearing a Jets jersey sexually assaulted three nurses and a teenager in and around Winnipeg’s largest hospital, the Health Sciences Centre (HSC), on July 2, according to police.

While officers searched for the suspect, hospital workers finished their shifts and walked back to their vehicles, unaware a predator was at large. Later, police would report that a third woman was assaulted that night in the area, by the same man. Staff didn’t learn what happened until the following day.

For HSC employees, these assaults weren’t an aberration. They were a tipping point after years of increasing violence against hospital staff. In a 2024 survey, one-third of physicians at HSC reported experiencing an average of eleven safety episodes in the previous year, almost double the provincial rate. A safety episode can include threats, violence, sexual assault, and harassment. HSC alone accounted for nearly half of all reported assaults on Manitoba doctors. Physicians described being punched, kicked, spat on, and bombarded with verbal abuse. The danger follows them outside the hospital into walkways and parking lots, where some have been chased and attacked coming to and from the job.

This summer, members of the Manitoba Nurses Union took the rare step of voting to “grey-list” HSC, a powerful public warning issued only five times over the past forty-five years. Grey listing alerts nurses that HSC is deemed unsafe, signalling they should reconsider or use caution when applying to or accepting work there. It doesn’t force current employees to quit, but it sends a clear message to the public and government about the facility’s working conditions. In November, the union grey-listed a second Manitoba facility, Thompson General Hospital, due to unsafe working conditions.

For some health care workers, attacks can have consequences that last months or even years. Winnipeg nurse Jennifer Noone suffered a serious concussion after one such episode. She told the CBC that, as she was arriving for work, she felt a pull on her backpack. She was then slammed against a doorframe and a wall by a tall man. Noone fought back, struggling just long enough to slip through a locked door and out of his reach. Safe inside, she was left with a head injury and post-traumatic stress disorder that forced her onto leave. It would take her two years before she could even begin a gradual return to work.

This violence is part of a broader provincial and national crisis. Across Canada, health care workers are reporting daily threats, assaults, and harassment. In north-central Manitoba, Royal Canadian Mounted Police are called almost daily to remove violent patients at Thompson. In 2024, the police went there 557 times. On Christmas Eve in 2024, a thirty-three-year-old man with a .22 calibre shotgun locked himself inside Thompson’s hospital chapel, pointed the gun at staff, and shot through a window before being arrested.

And in Moncton, New Brunswick, then nurse manager Natasha Poirier was cornered in her office at Dr. Georges-L.-Dumont University Hospital Centre and beaten by Bruce Randolph “Randy” Van Horlick. Furious that his wife had been moved to a different room, the sixty-nine-year-old yanked her from her chair by the hair, punched her head repeatedly, and hurled her against the wall. A nurse who rushed to help was also attacked before two men finally stopped Van Horlick. He was sentenced to six months in jail and two years’ probation. Poirier told the National Post she still carries the consequences six years later: a brain injury, PTSD, and lasting difficulties with memory, speech, and sensory overload.

Poirer was attacked in 2019, but even back then, nurses were raising the alarm about their experiences at work. That year, Linda Silas, president of Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions, told a parliamentary standing committee on health that 61 percent of nurses reported experiencing abuse, harassment, and assault on the job in the previous year. That number climbed sharply during the pandemic, reaching 93 percent in 2021. In Toronto’s University Health Network, incidents in two emergency departments—at Toronto Western and Toronto General—rose 169 percent, from 0.43 to 1.15 events per 1,000 visits, between 2019 and 2022. In British Columbia, the province’s nurses’ union said there was a 49 percent increase in injuries, reported WorkSafeBC: from 1,653 incidents between 2013 and 2017 to 2,458 between 2018 and 2022.

Nurses believe staffing shortages are partially to blame. Overcrowding and long wait times have also become flashpoints for patients and their family members. And, in 2018, unions representing hospital workers and Winnipeg hospital administrators linked rising incidents to the province’s ongoing meth crisis.

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In response, governments and hospitals are turning to airport-like security. Anyone entering the emergency room at Infirmary Hospital in Halifax must pass through a metal detector and may be searched. This year, London Health Sciences Centre in Ontario introduced AI-enabled weapons detection systems. There’s no need for visitors to empty their pockets or bags. Instead, they walk between detector poles that are capable of distinguishing between potentially dangerous objects, such as knives or scissors, and harmless items, like keys or coins.

In August, Nova Scotia’s government announced that AI-powered metal detectors will eventually be rolled out province-wide. After a trial run in May, the Colchester East Hants Health Centre in Truro screened 7,400 people and flagged forty-nine prohibited items, mostly pocketknives and box cutters. The items were confiscated and returned when visitors left. Windsor Regional Hospital in Ontario reported flagging over 3,100 weapons in a single year, including 1,834 knives, after installing similar technology in 2023.

Back in Manitoba, the province’s nurses’ union has demanded better security for years, especially at HSC, which sits in one of Winnipeg’s highest-crime areas and has had several serious incidents. In 2018, employees were issued personal alarms that emit a piercing scream when activated (while they can be a deterrent, the alarms don’t prevent an attacker from doing physical harm). Earlier that year, a correctional officer escorting an inmate was attacked by another patient wielding surgical scissors in HSC’s forensic psychiatric unit. While responding to this scene, a Winnipeg police officer was bitten by a second patient. The following year, the Manitoba government announced that hospital security guards would be trained and reclassified as institutional safety officers with the power to detain violent individuals. But, according to CBC reporting, years passed before these officers were deployed to HSC.

In November 2023, the Manitoba Nurses Union filed a grievance with Shared Health, the provincial body that oversees health care delivery, arguing the changes weren’t enough. Just three months later, the day before the final arbitration hearing between Shared Health and the union, an ER standoff broke out at HSC while more than forty patients were in the waiting room, according to the CBC. A man threatened staff, reached into a pocket, presumably for a weapon, and was tackled by a security guard. During the struggle, the guard was stabbed.

In 2024, five years after the government’s initial promise, the first institutional safety officers finally began patrolling HSC. Similar officers were later added at Winnipeg’s St. Boniface and Victoria Hospitals, Selkirk Mental Health Centre, and Brandon Regional Health Centre, with plans to expand to Thompson. In 2025, AI-powered weapon detectors were installed at three HSC entrances. Despite all these changes, nurses felt it wasn’t enough. They were right: despite the safety officers’ presence, the sexual assaults still happened, and weapon detectors cannot stop hospital staff from being punched or kicked.

The vote to grey-list HSC this August came hours after staff learned of a sixth sexual assault on campus in just a couple of weeks, according to the Winnipeg Free Press. Security found the woman and took her inside for treatment. Police arrested a thirty-nine-year-old man soon after. On the same day, a patient being transferred from HSC’s Crisis Response Centre to the ER claimed to be carrying a bomb, sparking a police response. Both incidents underscored the union’s warning that the hospital had become dangerous. Shared Health convened a meeting with union leaders and government officials. In a statement, the organization pointed to steps already implemented over the years, such as hiring more safety officers, adding AI weapon scanners, and installing 100 new cameras. The Manitoba Nurses Union also demanded new measures: swipe-card access for tunnels, secure entrances always staffed, and a notice as soon as it’s known a dangerous offender is active in or near the facility.

The grey listing has ignited a political firestorm. Opposition Progressive Conservative leader Obby Khan accused Manitoba’s New Democratic Party of presiding over a health care crisis, while the government countered it was fixing problems caused by years of Conservative neglect. By September, the Manitoba government announced further action: two Winnipeg police officers would be stationed at HSC’s ER around the clock at a cost of $1.6 million annually; five additional weapon-detection scanners, costing roughly $750,000, would be installed at public entrances; and fourteen more safety officers would be hired, bringing the campus total to eighty-one.

It’s unclear whether these added measures are helping. Last month, on the first weekend of twenty-four-hour police patrols at HSC, a doctor was assaulted by a patient. The facility remains grey-listed and under scrutiny, a stark symbol of a national health care system grappling with violence, fear, and the urgent need to protect both patients and staff.