Health authority denies access being restricted
The Nova Scotia Health Authority denies preventing patients from travelling outside their community to get a family doctor.
Dr. Richard Gibson, NSHA senior medical director, primary health care and department of family practice, questions assertions made in a recent column on health care, carried by the Chronicle Herald.
In the Dr. A.J. column, the author relates restrictions set upon family doctors and also said patients could not go to doctors in other coverage areas.
“Doctors have been moved from one community to another and patients from their previous ‘postal codes’ were not allowed to follow them to the new location,” the column says. “Patients were not allowed to join collaborative centres in a specific geography if they did not have the right postal code, regardless of the complexity or the urgency of their health needs.”
Gibson disputes that claim. “It’s not a fact and I don’t know where she got it from,” Gibson said. “Basically, doctors are selfemployed professionals, they’re free to relocate themselves from one community to another. When they do that, oftentimes the patients follow them. We as a health authority have no authority whatsoever to tell patients where they are to go and where they are not to go so there’s no way on Earth we would tell the patients they couldn’t follow their doctor to the new location, so I don’t know what she’s talking about.
“Most of the clinics are run by doctors and . . . some of them are run by private agencies like community health boards or pharmacies. Some clinics have their own private policies on where they accept patients from and don’t accept patients from but, again, those are not coming from the health authority, those are clinic policies.”
Gibson said the health authority is formulating a response to the column. He also said there’s no restriction on someone who does not have a family doctor joining a practice in another coverage area. “If they find a family doctor, they’re free to go anywhere they want to,” he said.
That’s not the experience of Dan Coffin, one of several people who have contacted The Chronicle Herald saying they have not been able to get a family doctor outside their coverage area.
In a letter to the editor in the Nov. 24 edition, Coffin, a Dartmouth resident, wrote that he found a collaborative practice outside HRM that was accepting new patients but, when he called, he was told the clinic uses the province’s 811 health information service’s list of patients seeking a family doctor to manage their referrals.
“A call to 811 resulted in my being advised that they could not add my name to the list for that practice because the referrals are determined using postal codes, and referrals will not be made outside a specific geographic area despite applicants’ willingness to travel for services,” he said in the letter.
Contacted Monday, Coffin said he is still in the same situation.
“I still haven’t found a doctor. I have not received any phone calls for referrals,” Coffin said. “I was definitely told by two people, actually, within the Nova Scotia Health Authority that they only refer certain geographic locations and I could not be referred outside that area.”
Gibson said that the Need a Family Practice Registry gives a list of patients from a given community to a new family doctor if one sets up in that community. He said the registry doesn’t allow for sorting out those willing to drive a certain distance for a family doctor versus those who can’t do so.