1 in 5 in N.L. don't have an FP and docs say burden of paperwork is restricting access

St. John's, N.L. – The new numbers are from Newfoundland and Labrador but the challenge is one seen in many provinces: Canadians who don't have a family doctor.Every year, the Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association (NLMA) commissions Narrative Research to survey those in the province about their access to family doctors and this year's survey, done with 400 adults in August, showed that 19% of people in Newfoundland and Labrador do not have a family doctor. Dr. Charlene Fitzgerald"The new polling numbers indicate that this is a growing problem,” said NLMA president Dr. Charlene Fitzgerald in a press release. “In 2014, 11% of the population reported not having a family doctor. In 2017, that number had grown to 13%. Today it is 19%. This represents two in ten people or as many as 99,000 residents without a family doctor.”Of those without a family doctor, 48% say they rely on walk-in clinics for their primary health care needs and 42% reported relying on hospital emergency departments.“Every citizen deserves to have a continuous relationship with a family doctor, but in our province family medicine is eroding. We are simply not recruiting and retaining enough family doctors to keep pace with the growing needs of our population. This is a systemic problem that physicians have been warning the government about for years. Efforts to date are not working and we need a broader and more thorough response to this problem,” said Dr. Fitzgerald.“The NLMA put its solutions in a vision paper more than a year ago and presented it to the government. We called on government to prepare a provincial physician human resource plan that identifies the appropriate number and placement of family physicians to meet the province’s current and future primary health care needs. To get this process started, the NLMA has commissioned health human resource consultant Dr. David Peachey to conduct a family physician human resource forecast that will be presented to the provincial government later in the fall,” added Dr. Fitzgerald.Dr. Nicole Stockley, an FP in Conception Bay South, N.L., told the CBC recently that she spends a quarter of her time on administrative tasks and in a fee-for-service system that makes it challenging to manage the complex needs of her patients."It's a burden that I hadn't really expected, and I find it frustrating at times," she told the CBC, of all that time spent on paperwork around medications, investigations, helping patients with insurance forms and following up on consultations. "It's very common that if I see a patient in my clinic, it's not just one issue I'm dealing with. . . . Usually it's three or four or five, and that's on top of an acute issue that may be the patient's primary reason for seeing me that day."The situation is improving, provincial Health Minister Dr. John Haggie told the broadcaster noting ,that Eastern Health has 68 more family doctors now than in 2010, and that 94% of Memorial University family medicine residents are still practising in the province two years later.But Dr. Stockley said many Newfoundland doctors are feeling burned out. "We're getting to a breaking point, where as much as family physicians have been putting their heads down and trying to provide as much care as they can for their patients, we are standing up and saying we can't possible do this anymore in the system that exists and there needs to be change, and we need to be part of that change," she told the CBC.Dr. Fitzgerald, who is halfway through her 11-community NLMA president's tour, said collaborative, team-based approaches is a forward as a part of potential solutions.Dr. Stockley said that would make it easier to care for patients with complex needs. "Really remunerating physicians for quality of care and ensuring that patients have that time to deal with the broad scope of issues that they have is really important," she said.

1 in 5 in N.L. don't have an FP and docs say burden of paperwork is restricting access

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