B.C. NDP health critic Judy Darcy (left) and leader John Horgan speak with Karen Stalker, a Falkland resident who is struggling to find a doctor for her family of four.
Andrea Klassen/KTW
A promise by the B.C. government that people across the province would have access to a family doctor if they wanted one by 2015 has been a “colossal failure,” B.C. NDP leader John Horgan told media in Kamloops on Wednesday.
In 2013, the B.C. Liberal government announced it would spend millions to expand A GP For Me, a program matching patients with doctors, provincewide to meet its ambitious two-year goal.
Horgan and NDP health critic Judy Darcy, who were in the Interior this week to speak with health workers and patients’ groups, said it’s a goal the government isn’t close to meeting.
“A GP For Me was a colossal failure,” Horgan said.
“A quarter-of-a-million people or more don’t have a family doctor.”
The pair called for more team-based care in the province’s small and rural communities, where nurse practitioners and other health-care workers could take some of the burden off family doctors.
“Young doctors, right out of med school, don’t want to have the burden of an entire community on their backs,” Horgan said.
“And, that’s how they feel when they come into town.”
While the pair acknowledged the government has some teams in place, including an interdisciplinary squad on the North Shore at the King Street medical clinic, Darcy said the practice needs to go mainstream.
“It’s the exception rather than the rule,” she said. “And in Ontario, for example, they have gone in the direction of nurse practitioners for many years. They have many more times as many per capita as we do here in British Columbia.”
Kamloops-North Thompson MLA and Minister of Health Terry Lake said he agrees with the NDP that a team-based approach works, but said it’s not an across-the-board solution.
“Ontario has done a lot of work in these family health centres and, what they’ve done in Ontario is, they’ve actually put a bit of a hold on it because what they were seeing is the costs were rising substantially while the number of patients being seen was going down,” he said.
Lake said B.C. prefers to use the team model for mental-health and substance-abuse treatment, as well as for care for lower-income patients.
“Those integrated teams do a great job of serving vulnerable populations,” Lake said.
“For the rest of the population, certainly there are situations where team-based care works extremely well and it’s something we’re doing more and more, but we have to make sure it’s sustainable.”
The government is also trying out other models that use paramedics to provide some community health care in the Northern Health region.
Lake believes the government is doing “quite well” in doctor attraction, noting the Manitoba NDP government made a similar promise to bring in enough doctors for all by 2015, with similar results.
“This is a challenge that is faced everywhere in Canada,” Lake said.
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