Hundreds of health care workers and patients who don’t have a primary care provider held a rally on the grounds of the B.C. Legislature in Victoria on Thursday.
Members of BC Health Care Matters marked World Family Doctor Day by calling on the government to address the province’s severe shortage of primary-care physicians.
Some rally participants wore black to signify that they didn’t currently have a family doctor — while others wore white to signify they did.
Roy and Diane Nelson attended the rally and said their family doctor of several decades is retiring in November.
“I’m getting a new knee soon, it’s going to mean something if I don’t have someone to check on me,” said Roy.
Barbara Duffield said her previous doctor retired and while she was able to find a new one, that doctor has recently gone on stress leave for a month.
“My husband has cancer and to not have her on his side would just be devastating to me.”
Dr. Michelle Workun-Hill drove down from Nanaimo to be at the rally. She’s a family physician who currently works at a walk-in clinic.
“It’s the only one we have left and it’s pretty dismal so I’m telling probably 10 people a shift that there’s nothing I can do to help them get a doctor,” she said.
“The care we’re providing is not the kind of care you should be giving, it’s very complicated mental health, chronic care, we have cancer we have bipolar disorder, we have things you can’t manage with an eight minute walk in appointment with no follow up.”
Statistics Canada says nearly 18 per cent of B.C. residents over the age of 12 had no family doctor in 2019.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons says the number of retiring doctors over the next 10 years is set to leave another 1.2-million people without primary care.
Dr. Carllin Man with Family Doctors for Better Patient Care in BC says the biggest issue is how family physicians are paid and he says the solution is actually fairly simple.
“We’re paid the same no matter if we spend 30 seconds or 30 minutes so we need to fix that problem by introducing time-based fee for service. 90 per cent of family doctors practice with fee for service, so by allowing family doctor to be valued for their time by billing for time based fee-for-service many doctors will stay,” he said.
The B.C. government has faced heat over its handling of the crisis, with the opposition claiming it hasn’t done enough to address the long-standing shortage.
The government, however, has said efforts are being made to recruit family doctors, particularly in the hard-hit region of southern Vancouver Island, with plans to spend $74 million in operating funds to hire 372 full-time employees at six primary care networks.
In a news conference last month, B.C. Premier John Horgan said the province needs funding from the federal government in order to address the issue of long wait times.
“It will continue to erode if we don’t have a massive infusion of federal capital,” Horgan said. “The line-ups are getting longer because we don’t have the resources to manage them.”
Horgan said he has been pushing the federal government to provide more funding. He added that when the universal health care program in Canada was first implemented, the costs were split 50-50 and now it’s closer to the provinces paying 80 per cent.
With files from The Canadian Press.
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