Kingston clinic registers 600 patients in two days
Sign-up events last week led to long lines, which one expert sees as far too common
A Kingston family clinic says roughly 600 patients have been rostered after two days last week when hundreds of people lined up in hopes of snagging a family doctor.
On Feb. 26 and 28, people spent hours waiting in line after hearing that CDK Family Medicine on Sutherland Drive was accepting new patients. In its rostering process, it required an online pre-registration and an in-person attendance at one of the two rostering events.
In a statement on its website, the clinic said staff stayed until 9 p.m. — four hours beyond its usual closing time — to manage the line of individuals that wound its way along Montreal Street on Feb. 26.
The clinic, which operates two locations in Kingston and employs around eight family doctors and a number of other staff, advertised it would limit its line on Feb. 28 to 100 people. Attendees began to arrive at the clinic at 3:30 a.m. to wait in line for a chance to be rostered at 10 a.m.
The clinic will continue to limit line numbers as it proceeds with future rostering events, during which time it aims to add as many as 4,000 patients to the clinic.
“We work tirelessly every day seeing rostered patients, serving unattached patients through our walk-in and booked appointments, while trying to connect (3,000 to 4,000) unattached patients to a family doctor,” the clinic shared on its website late last week. “We have not received government funding for this or any work we do. Therefore it is not feasible to continue at this rate, unless we set clear rostering limits for each CDK rostering day.”
The clinic, which is working to connect directly with Kingston residents as well as using wait-lists from Ontario's Health Care Connect program, also responded to some online complaints from people who criticized its approach to rostering, saying there is “no single way of rostering that would satisfy every individual.”
“While we understand some patients are unhappy about the wait-times and we are still learning about how to improve the CDK rostering day experience, we are not the cause of the doctor shortages and there is no automated way to `batch roster' patients, either by (the Ministry of Health) or by Health Care Connect,” the clinic wrote on its website.
“Hence rostering through multiple channels — in-person, through HCC, off retired doctors' lists and through referrals by doctors — is the only way to connect patients quickly to a family doctor.”
Inspire-phc is a government-funded group of researchers who are located at universities across the province working to collect and organize data in Ontario related to the province's health care system. Those researchers are led by a team at Queen's University, including Eliot Frymire, a research manager at the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research at Queen's, and Inspire-phc's project manager.
The latest data from the province show 14.3 per cent of residents in the Frontenac and Lennox and Addington region are uncertainly attached within eight forward sortation areas — that is, eight different regions represented by eight three-digit characters in the postal codes in the region.
That represents nearly 48,000 individuals, Inspire-phc confirmed to Postmedia on Monday.
While updated data from the Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Ontario Health Team (FLA- OHT) aren't available yet, in 2022 that number was 9.3 per cent.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg, what you saw in that lineup,” Frymire said in an interview. “By and large, these numbers represent the reality of access to primary health care in Kingston.”
He says the data produced by his research team are designed to help Ontario residents and the government understand the bigger picture underneath the surface issue that people don't see.
“There are the people who are at home just trying to eke out some type of access to health care, whether it be through drop-in clinics or through emergency departments,” he pointed out.
According to the latest data from the province between March 2022 and March 2023, Ontario's primary care attachment rate has slightly decreased to 84.7 per cent from 85.2 per cent.
Frymire points to the importance of family medicine in Ontario's health care system: In a 24hour period, looking at the average number of health care services accessed in the province in 2019-20, 141,200 were family physician visits, compared with 71,200 specialist visits and 14,700 emergency department visits.
According to the Ontario Medical Association, the growing family doctor shortage is largely due to the stress and administrative burden associated with the profession, which is driving current practitioners to retire or move to specialized practices and discouraging new medical graduates from choosing family medicine as a profession that allows a work-life balance.
Investing more money in the primary-care system is a step toward repairing what Frymire describes as a crisis situation in Kingston and across Ontario.
Inspire-phc's website points to an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, published in December 2023, that finds the Canadian government spends “less of its total health budget on primary care than the average among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries,” at 5.3 per cent versus 8.1 per cent.
“The (Ministry of Health) has identified primary care access as a priority and is taking steps to address it, but what is really required is a shift in health care budgets to accurately reflect the foundational role that primary care plays in the whole health care system,” Frymire said.
CDK is rostering patients not only in person, but also by reaching out to those who have been on the province's Health Care Connect wait-list for more than three years.
Frymire said Health Care Connect, while one tool for the province to assist unattached patients, has only captured up to 12 per cent of Ontarians without family doctors.
“That list is only a small fraction of the total number of people who actually don't have a family doctor,” he said. “It doesn't have good uptake by the public, in terms of signing up. So it didn't surprise me at all that people were lining up.”
Frymire says he sees the work CDK Family Medicine has done to connect with unattached patients as commendable.
“The recent impressive efforts by the CDK clinic are to be applauded,” Frymire said. “But this situation is really no different in any other community in Ontario, and in many places it is even more dire.”
As CDK Family Medicine moves toward future rostering events, it's requesting its potentially new patients to be respectful of the process.
“We ask that patients have realistic expectations, be respectful of our staff and policies at all times and refrain from spreading misinformation verbally or via social media posts,” the clinic shared on its website. “This web page is the official source of information regarding rostering at CDK.”
The clinic also wants people to avoid unnecessarily long lineups during its events.
“Please note that lineups that go indefinitely beyond our specified rostering capacity will adversely impact the businesses around us and cause security risks and safety concerns,” the website stated. “Patients must respect the rostering capacity limits at all times and not insist on staying beyond our cutoff.”