Clinics dicey
Re: “Redford pledges 140 family clinics,” April 3.
As a family physician, leader on the board of a large primary care network, parent, patient and concerned Albertan, I am greatly dismayed by Premier Alison Redford’s promise of 140 family care centres within the next three years. I have multiple pressing concerns about this campaign promise that has all the superficial window dressing of being a crowd-pleasing fulfilment of a leadership bid promise with a perceived direct benefit to Albertans in terms of heath-care access.
The FCC concept is new, unproven (only one month of experience), has been formed with no Alberta Medical Association or direct primary care MD consultation, and compares unfavourably to current costs of primary care delivery via Pcn-aligned family physicians ($500 versus $62/patient/annum budgeted).
Primary care networks have already positioned themselves over the past 10 years to deliver multidisciplinary, after-hours and same-day accessible health care. Effectively, FCCS already exist, and are heavily invested in by the current champions of a patient’s “medical home” (where comprehensive, longitudinal care can be consistently obtained) — the 7,200 family physicians of Alberta.
The FCC concept is illconceived, hugely redundant and risks exposing more fragmentation and episodic care to an already disjointed system that has difficulty reconciling its various components. We need to renovate and expand the patient-centred “medical home” family doctors provide, rather than slap together a tent city of siloed and inexperienced FCCS that do not involve established primary care delivery services.
Brendan Vaughan, MD, Calgary