The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority has come out with more information about the labour adjustments associated with the next phase of the city's health care overhaul.

Mental health and surgery services are being moved -- mental health will be consolidated at Victoria Hospital and Health Sciences Centre, and surgery will be spread primarily between Grace, Concordia, HSC, and St. Boniface.

This consolidation will happen in an effort to improve access for patients and reduce the need for patients to be moved between facilities. Staff with specific expertise to support these programs and their patients will also move.

"The expertise required for the delivery of specialty services has been spread too thinly throughout our region for too long," said Lori Lamont, Acting COO and Vice President Nursing and Health Professions. "This next wave of consolidation brings mental health resources together in concentrated areas, allowing us to bring patients with similar needs together in order to offer more streamlined care and less movement for patients who are already in distress."

Lamont says these changes will result in the potential deletion of about 150 positions.

"Because we have the opportunity to use what's called the transfer language, where staff at Seven Oaks and at the Grace will have an opportunity to select a new position, it may not be necessary to actually issue all of them a deletion notice. If they are able to select a new job, we can do that without that step in the process," explained Lamont.

The WRHA says 53 mental health nursing positions will be available at HSC and Victoria; 51 nurses in the mental health program at Grace and Seven Oaks will have a chance to move over. 90 nurses in surgery at Seven Oaks will be given the chance to transition into one of 73 positions.

The WRHA says between current vacancies and new and existing positions, there will be opportunities for any nurse who wants to remain working in the WRHA.

"We will be looking very carefully at what our staffing is and considering that as we start moving people," said Lamont. "It is important that when we get to that time of move in, we'll have a very careful plan that looks at our ability to staff, our ability to familiarize these staff who will be working in a new environment, and also looking at how do we safely move patients form one facility to another without causing any unnecessary disruption to their care."

In line with the Healing our Health System plan, efforts to better match staffing at facilities across the region with the patient population(s) they serve, the region will be updating master rotations at all hospitals in order to align staffing levels and concentration of services with patient demand. These efforts will be complete before the end of 2019.