FAMILY DOCTOR SHORTAGE A THREAT TO HEALTH CARE IN ATLANTIC CANADA

Your family doctor retires or moves on. Suddenly, unexpectedly, you feel alone and unprotected.

Calls to family medical clinics blend in with the reams of calls from others like you. The answer is always, “Sorry, we are not taking new patients.”

Weeks turn into months. Anxiety kicks in. Visits to walkin clinics or emergency rooms are often frustrating experiences.

Everest Howse, 62, knows that feeling.

In 2016, Howse, who lives in Steady Brook, N.L., found himself without a family doctor for the first time in his life.

And he needed a family doctor more than ever with complications cropping up from past health conditions — two aneurisms, heart surgery and a back injury.

Howse says he contacted about 20 family doctors in his area, visited clinics and made hundreds of calls, to no avail.

Finally, in desperation, he made up a double cardboard sign displaying his displeasure, attached it to his shoulders with clear packing tape, and began a one-man protest at Western Memorial Hospital in nearby Corner Brook.

The protest drew attention from hospital staff and the local health authority, and he was eventually linked with a new family doctor.

Not everyone can, or is willing to, take their frustration and channel it the way Howse did.

In Atlantic Canada, it is estimated that between nine and 13 per cent of the population doesn’t have a family physician.

Though the issue is not limited to the Atlantic provinces — there’s an international shortage — Nova Scotia, P.E.I., New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador have a particularly difficult struggle with aging populations and a problem with recruiting family physicians for rural areas.

In New Brunswick, according to that province’s medical society, there are about

50,000 people without a family doctor.

“Recruiting new family physicians is harder than ever before,” the society states.

“We need a flexible strategy for the recruitment and retention of physicians in the province.”

According to the P.E.I. patient registry program, there were 12,213 people looking for a new family doctor as of January.

Nova Scotia’s patient registry, as of Jan. 1, 2019, recorded 52,680 people waiting to be placed with a family physician — representing about 5.7 per cent of the province’s population.

Newfoundland and Labrador doesn’t have a provincial patient registry, but it’s estimated that up to 13 per cent of the population doesn’t have a family doctor — more than 60,000 people.

As if these numbers weren’t challenging enough for the health-care system, family doctors in all provinces are managing patients who are older and have more complex medical conditions.

This means more time is needed with each patient, further limiting the number of patients a doctor can take on.

Dr. Lynn Dwyer, a family physician in St. John’s, says she’s seen the burden of work increase over her 31 years of practice.

She believes government needs a human resource plan developed to identify how many family physicians are needed and where.

“(Family doctors) know the current system is not sustainable,” she says.