Revised registry will boost care access: Dix
Over 800 doctors, nurse practitioners accepting patients, minister says
Health Minister Adrian Dix said up to 170,000 people could be attached to 800 family doctors and nurse practitioners accepting new patients through improvements to the province's family doctor registry.
However, a Victoria nurse who has been waiting to be matched with a family doctor through the Health Connect registry since 2020 is skeptical the changes will speed up the process, while the B.C. United leader accused the minister of fudging the numbers on how many family doctors have been added in the province.
“No, it doesn't provide me any hope because there are not enough doctors,” said Paula Leweke, a 69-year-old registered nurse who struggled without a family doctor last year when she needed a hip replacement and suffered a herniated disk. “There's not enough nurse practitioners. There's just not enough.”
Speaking during a news conference in Victoria on Thursday, Dix said more than 800 family doctors and nurse practitioners have told the Health Ministry they are available to accept an estimated 170,000 new patients.
The province is hiring 70 primary care network attachment co-ordinators to guide people through the Health Connect registry and speed up contact between patients and a family doctor in their community.
Starting April 17, the province will roll out a standardized, digital registry system that Dix said will improve the process from “end to end” — meaning from the time a patient signs up on the registry to when they are connected with a family doctor. People on the registry will be contacted by email and phone, and eventually by text message, with updates on their waiting list status every three months.
The Health Ministry said the new system uses artificial intelligence to determine which family doctors are accepting new patients, and matches those physicians with a mix of patients based on the severity of their health issues.
That will speed up what is currently a more labour-intensive process, where registry staff call doctors' offices to find out their availability.
Staff sometimes would call patients to connect them only to find out they had already found a family doctor themselves.
Dix would not give an estimate for how long people who sign up to the registry can expect to wait for a family doctor, saying patients will be prioritized based on the severity of their health concerns and the length of time they have been on the registry. There will be an effort to attach family members living in the same household to the same doctor or nurse practitioner.
Last July, Dix announced the existing Health Connect registry would be expanded to all areas of the province in an effort to connect patients with a doctor or nurse practitioner in their area.
A second registry for primary care providers was launched that lets the province know which doctors and nurse practitioners are accepting patients.
However, since July, many patients have complained they had already been on the waiting list for years and saw no progress in getting a family doctor. Many British Columbians resort to cold-calling clinics in the hopes of finding a family doctor accepting new patients.
Rita McCracken, a Vancouver-based family doctor and assistant professor in the University of B.C.'s department of family practice, said she has her “fingers crossed” for people waiting on the registry to be attached to a doctor, but she also encourages them to check with doctors the old-fashioned way when they see a new clinic pop up.
McCracken cited a study in Quebec, a province that has had a centralized family doctor waiting list since 2008, that found healthy patients typically wait at least three years to be attached to a physician.
“It's a complicated, wicked problem,” she said. “We don't have any promise from any past successes that having a registry is going to create a fix.”
Dix said 310,000 people are currently on the waiting list, and 67,700 people have been attached through the registry since 2018. Just under half of those — 30,000 — have been attached since July.
He said the province saw a net of 708 new family physicians working in primary care from December 2022 to December 2023.
However, B.C. United Leader Kevin Falcon said those numbers amount to a “shell game” as Dix repeatedly refused to answer questions from Opposition MLAs about how many of those positions are full-time and how many of those doctors are simply coming from other areas of the health system.
“Does anyone out there really believe there are 700 new family physicians?” Falcon asked during a news conference on Thursday. “I can tell you, I know lots of people that have been on that registry for a doctor for years and have yet to hear a thing in terms of a new physician.”
Falcon said it is interesting timing that, six months before a provincial election, Dix has come out with an “updated, beefed-up registry that's going to solve all these problems.”
“Well, you can believe them if you want to, but I'll wait to see the results,” he said.
There are 885,000 British Columbians without a family doctor, according to the most recent Canadian Community Health survey. That is an improvement, Dix said, from 2022 figures that put the number of British Columbians without a family doctor at one million.