Winnipeg woman says little has changed since 26-hour ER wait in 2025

A Winnipeg woman who waited nearly 26 hours in a hospital emergency department in 2025 says she is disappointed by what she sees as a lack of progress in reducing wait times.

Beverley Masters, 73, was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1996. Following a breast cancer diagnosis that year, she had treatments, including chemotherapy and radiation, performed. They were successful for some years until the cancer returned, and later, spread.

After the Grace Hospital’s Cancer Care Manitoba ward was temporarily shut down, she said she began going to the Health Science Centre (HSC) in Winnipeg.

In October of 2025, while she was a patient at the centre, Masters said she began taking a new medication and ended up in the emergency department weeks later.

“HSC wouldn’t let me come into the urgent care. They advised I had to go by ambulance to HSC emergency. And that’s when things went downhill dramatically.”

Masters waited almost 26 hours to see a doctor while in that emergency ward, she said.

“I wasn’t even actually in the ER for the first 14 hours,” Masters said. Instead, she said she was sitting on a stretcher in a hallway between the ambulance bay and emergency room.

Several other people on stretchers joined her in the hallway, where they sat “foot-to-head,” with nowhere to put their belongings or use the washroom, she recounted, adding that she used a bedpan in “what looked like a janitorial closet.”

Eventually, Masters said she received medical care in the form of a 15 minute ultrasound, followed by blood thinners – the exact treatment she received at Grace after a few hours of waiting.

“For me, all I needed was an ultrasound. It could have been easily solved. There must have been at least one facility in the six hospitals that could have squeezed me in somewhere, as they did in September of 2023,” she said.

The experience also inspired her to send a letter to Manitoba’s government, and health minister, asking for a cancer care-specific emergency department in 2025. She said she has never heard back from the province.

“There are people willing to die at home alone, rather than ever subject themselves to the HSC emergency room again,” Masters said as she read the letter she sent.

She said she felt prompted to contact Global News after its story last week.

Global News spoke with Theresa Chanowski, the daughter of Colleen Titanich, a terminally ill woman, was left on a stretcher in the hallway of the HSC in Winnipeg for 20 hours in the emergency room .