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Clinical Planning

Francophone Health collaborates with health service delivery organizations (SDOs) and community stakeholders to prioritize services that are most frequently accessed by the Francophone population, while continuing to support other services that patients rely on. Ensuring equitable access to health services in French is essential to upholding Manitoba’s French Language Services Policy and to supporting the health, safety, and dignity of all Manitobans.

Francophones in Manitoba may experience communication barriers when accessing care, which can affect their ability to understand medical information, participate in decision-making, and fully benefit from health services. By integrating the needs of Manitoba’s Francophone minority into clinical planning, the health system fulfills both its legislative and ethical responsibilities while strengthening equity, communication, and trust in care delivery.

To address the needs of Francophones, provincial clinical planning must:

  • Identify and map Francophone populations to anticipate demand for services in the minority official language and to inform the distribution and delivery of French-language clinical services.
  • Integrate French-language capacity into clinical pathways, staffing models including the recruitment and retention of bilingual professionals, and the development of bilingual positions where feasible.
  • Provide linguistically and culturally appropriate services, including access to bilingual clinicians, interpretation services, and translated materials.
  • Collaborate with Francophone community partners, such as Santé en français, to align planning with community-identified priorities and to strengthen culturally and linguistically appropriate service delivery.
  • Embed accountability and monitoring mechanisms, ensuring that French-language service access is regularly assessed and reported as part of quality improvement and patient safety processes.

Priority clinical areas

Primary Health and Community Care; Seniors & Rehabilitation; Emergency, Critical Care, and acute medicine; child and women's health; mental health and addictions.

Additional Resources