When the province introduced its Health 91原创 Registry in 2021, we were told this would help patients to find a family physician.
About 900,000 British Columbians have no doctor, and while the Health Ministry continues to announce the recruitment of new physicians, that number has remained fairly constant for years.
Yet the inability of the Registry to make meaningful progress is only one of its failings.
More troubling is that the Registry makes no attempt to place patients based on their age or medical condition. This conflicts with one of the basic principles underlying medical practice, that faced with an inability to treat everyone who needs help, those with the most pressing requirements should come first.
If the Registry did adopt a form of triage, it’s conceivable that some people desperate for a doctor might exaggerate their health status to jump the queue.
Nevertheless, with no end in sight of lengthy waitlists, some effort is required to give priority to those most in need.
Again, patients on the Registry receive no updates as to their place in the queue, or how long a wait they may still face. Requests for this information meet with blank stares.
Some residents who’ve been on the Registry since its inception have never received an update on their status and still have no family doctor.
Now it’s fair to say that no assurances about precise wait times can be given, since the arrival of new physicians varies from place to place. But patients can’t even be told how far from the top of the list they are, or what the average time it takes to place a patient.
Ontario runs a similar program, and states that 80 per cent of patients are successfully placed.
If the Registry’s job is to build a list of people who need a doctor, then the work of recruiting new physicians to the province falls mainly on divisions of family practice.
There are 35 of these province-wide, serving 230 communities. They each have staff funded by the Health Ministry, and they work in collaboration with Doctors of B.C., which represents physicians across the province.
We called the South Island division, which recruits family doctors for the 160,000 people on the Saanich Peninsula. It’s not an easy organization to get close to.
None of the division’s managers would talk to us, saying they were forbidden from speaking to the media.
This is, in itself, deeply troubling. We didn’t want confidential information of any sort, we simply wanted to know how the process of recruiting is carried out.
The best we can do is quote the division’s website.
Here is how the recruitment and retention co-ordinator describes her strategy: “Niki is on a mission to bring Family Physicians to the South Island. Well versed in great meals, local history and fantastic conversation, Niki aims to charm family physicians and their families into relocating to our area.”
No doubt this is well-intended, but it falls short of a professional approach to recruiting.
The impression given by both the Registry and the South Island division of family practice is that these are haphazard, poorly thought-out organizations in no way adequate to the crisis we all face.
What’s needed is a complete rethink of the entire process, starting with an emphasis on transparency and communication.
The Registry should put in place an automated reporting program through which patients are told every three months where in the queue they stand, and how long the average wait time is for their region.
And perhaps the services of a professional headhunting firm could be engaged to help recruit physicians, for there is no more urgent matter across the whole health-care field.
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