Doctor search tool diagnosed as outdated
College of Physicians and Surgeons will no longer offer the service as of Thursday
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C. will on Thursday delete a function on its website that was the only one of its kind in Canada for helping patients find doctors accepting new patients.
The problem? It was no longer living up to its billing.
College registrar Dr. Heidi Oetter said the website tool was offered many years ago as a public service, but it became increasingly apparent over the last few years the service was no longer useful because the information wasn’t current. Patients would scroll through lists and call dozens of offices listed as taking new patients, only to find not one of them was actually doing so.
Doctors were supposed to inform the college when their practices were full, but few actually did that. Oetter acknowledged the frustration that led to this point.
“Our website is still very useful in other ways for the public for looking up information about doctors’ licences and addresses, for example,” said Oetter. “But this other function was no longer useful, so it’s being disabled on March 1.”
Oetter said months ago that the college warned the Ministry of Health and Doctors of B.C. so no one would be caught off guard. The Ministry of Health sponsors a service called HealthLink that can be called (phone 811) for help finding a family practice. The HealthLink website can also be used to find lists of walk-in clinics and group medical practices that patients can call when searching.
Doctors were told about this in a recent college communique that said: “Once the feature is disabled, patients who phone the College seeking a family physician will be referred to HealthLink B.C. for a listing of walk-in clinics, and to applicable Divisions of Family Practice chapters with patient attachment mechanisms in place. Physicians, especially those who are planning to retire in the near future, are being asked to do the same, rather than directing their patients to the College.”
Oetter said since conventional solo practices are vanishing, group practices in which clusters of doctors share patient loads (also called team-based care or medical homes) are viewed as offering the potential for connecting more patients with primary care (family) doctors. Patients can attend a group practice, including a designated walkin clinic, and see either one particular doctor or someone else in the same clinic.
Although it is desirable to have a designated doctor to see each time, the medical home or group practice at least has “one unified record,” Oetter said, referring to an electronic chart or paper file documenting all the previous visits. Doctors working in walk-in clinics are subject to all the same college standards as other doctors.
Dr. Trina Larsen-Soles, president of Doctors of B.C., said after the college disables its “find a physician” link from its website, patients calling the organization in search of a family physician will also be referred to HealthLink B.C. Those who live in places where there are local divisions of family practice will be directed to “patient attachment” contacts.
There are 35 divisions of family practice across the province, but only 14 of them have implemented physician-patient matching services, she said. “We support an expansion of this service to all the divisions as we move forward to ... enhance patient access to primary care.”
B.C. would appear to have a record number of vacancies for primary care doctors, according to Health Match B.C., which currently lists 827 openings across the province. It is estimated there are 200,000 B.C. residents without a family doctor.
Kristy Anderson, director of communications for the Ministry of Health, said the province is looking to fund more nurse practitioners to fill gaps in communities where there are doctor shortages.
Installing such nurses along with other health professionals in group practices is also referred to as teambased care and Anderson said it is “foundational to our efforts to increase access to urgent primary care services, including the introduction of urgent primary care centres and other expanded primary care access options in B.C.”