We’re super lucky. Got a good family doc when we moved out here- she’s approximately my age, been a doc since 2013 or so. I’m super easy as a patient, but sheMs been amazing with my wife...- particularly in giving her the time to really listen. She’s freshly back to work after two kids in quick succession, so we’re hoping we’ll have her for another twenty years or so.
Flip side to that, my mom and stepdad, him with bad Leukemia, have no family doctor. Almost zero chance of getting one. But for the leukemia he’d likely be getting no meaningful care at all. And a great many people have similarly no access to regular care- I see it on my neighborhood Facebook group all the time, people looking for family clinics taking patients.
My cousin finished residency not too long ago. From some really candid conversation, the system by which we create doctors is brutal; we have resident in clinical settings working shifts 24 hours long, hopefully napping for a couple hours during that time and hoping they don’t crash the car on the way home. And that’s a conscious part of the resourcing model for hospital ERs.
The costs of medical school are horrendous, dissuading many from ever getting into the profession. Family physicians running a clinic eat the bulk of the overhead, which pushes more of them away from family medicine and into hospitals where they practice without paying for the infrastructure.
There needs to be a holistic look, combining both federal and provincial levels, into how Canada generates intake into the healthcare field, and how the practitioners are supported and sustained.
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