Make family practice more attractive
Re: “B.C. plan for urgent care centres unveiled,” May 25. B.C. health care has been starved for resources for decades. Operating rooms running at 50 per cent capacity in most hospitals due to lack of funding. (Hence long waits — there’s a surplus of orthopedic surgeons, it’s just that they aren’t allowed to operate as much as they could.)
There are lots of physicians out there who could be general practitioners, but choose not to be, when their paltry fees ($31 for a visit, and they pay their staff from that) haven’t kept up with other options, such as hospitalist or other salaried positions.
What we fear from this new program in “urgent care centres” (of salaried GPs working alongside salaried nurse practitioners in these urgent primary-care centers) is that the rest of us dinosaur GPs, who have been shouldering the load of primary care for far too long, will quit, as it puts us even further off the competitive playing field for locums and successors.
Two hundred more GPs promised by the NDP (who are at least trying to help) is a drop in the bucket. How about the other 3,000 of us? We are being left out. So are the 17 per cent who don’t have a GP.
Time to level the playing field and make family practice competitive and attractive. Problem of shortage of GPs for all solved. Dr. Vanessa Young Dr. Steve Keeler Victoria