I was a member of the panel they had for BC (citizen panel, we weren’t experts), if anyone has questions.
I’m in BC, and technically have a family doctor… and it sucks. My doctor is only seeing patients a couple of days per week, so appointments are currently booking out around 4 months. There’s ONE walk-in clinic where I live (Nanaimo), and they take a limited number of patients per day - they put out signs on a Saturday morning like “Only accepting 10 patients today” (I have a photo of this one to prove it). TThe ER is backup up so bad, you could die before they even triage you (18h or longer wait is normal). The staff at the Critical Care unit in the neighboring Parksville yells at you and tells you to go back to Nanaimo (it’s happened to both my wife and I at different times… and we both actually needed medical care). We’ve ended up driving to Port Alberni or Courtenay for medical care… or in my case, I’m travelling for business and have booked a doctor visit in another damn country to get some checkup work done because I can’t get it done locally… OK, I can get it, but the local wait times are so fucking long that I can book a flight, fly overseas and see a doctor, get my results and be back home a month before I’d even start the process with my family doctor.
Talkign with the parents at the local school… many are afraid that their kids will catch something… and thehy won’t be able to see a doctor to get the help they need
So yeah… there’s widespread frustration :-P
Yeah this was a disturbingly common theme in what many of the other panel members were experiencing. Canada has a great public healthcare system - if you have a family doctor (who isn’t overbooked). I do feel some optimism though as it seems like this current provincial government is actually making changes that are causing things to head in the right direction, but our panel had a lot of other suggestions that would help alleviate some of the burden on family doctors (the tl;dr is that family doctors provide way more care than they did 50 years ago and are also overburdened with paperwork, on top of an antiquated business model where they have to run a business with employees, bookkeeping, etc.)
The whole “run a business” thing is bonkers. No wonder so many family doctors give up and go do something else.
With that change in the CBC article that you linked… there’s hope. My family doctor told us that she’s going to retire this year… hopefully there’s a replacement or 10 at the clinic so people can start getting that initial care they need and relieve the pressure on the ER :-(
