When Simon McNeil and his wife, Pam Han, moved to rural Prince Edward Island from Toronto in 2018, they were looking for somewhere a little quieter to live.
They had no idea this decision would mean years of radio silence from the province’s patient registry — P.E.I.’s waiting list for family doctors.
“As soon as we moved here, we started looking for a family doctor, and we got on the waiting list,” McNeil said in an interview from his home in New Glasgow, P.E.I.
“At that time, we were told (the wait) was about two years. Sometime later, that estimate was changed to four years and now it’s looking more like eight.”
Simon McNeil and Pam Han say they have been waiting four years for a family doctor in P.E.I., forcing them to visit an emergency room if they become ill.
Submitted photo.
If the couple or their daughter gets sick or needs refills for necessary prescriptions, they must go to a walk-in clinic. But this has become almost impossible over the last two years, as clinics in P.E.I. have been filling up within minutes of opening, Han said.
The only option left for them is to take time off work and wait for hours in a hospital emergency room or pay out of pocket for a virtual health appointment — both of which the family has been forced to do over the last four years since moving to the East Coast.
“It’s certainly frustrating and also devastating,” Han said.
“We’ve become more isolated than we used to be. We don’t want to take the risk of getting sick, so we mostly just stay home.”
The P.E.I. couple is among millions of Canadians increasingly forced to seek non-urgent medical care in emergency departments due to a growing shortage of family physicians across the country.
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Nearly five million Canadians over the age of 12 did not have access to a family doctor in 2019, according to the latest available data from Statistics Canada. The rates of people living in Quebec, Alberta and Nova Scotia without a primary care provider rose significantly in 2019 compared with a previous survey in 2015, but all provinces reported proportions of 10 per cent of their populations or higher in need of a family doctor.
And these numbers have likely grown, as an increasing number of family physicians across Canada have been reducing their patient loads, cutting hours or leaving family medicine altogether, according to the College of Family Physicians of Canada.
This has led to a domino effect across the health-care system in Canada, where patients who no longer have access to primary care are now getting sicker from not being able to see a doctor early on when problems arise, said Dr. Katharine Smart, a pediatrician and the outgoing president of the Canadian Medical Association.
It is also leading to non-urgent patients being funnelled into emergency rooms that are already overburdened, due to growing a shortage of health-care workers in alternative care facilities like long-term care homes, she added.
It’s one of many factors that has led to a cascade of temporary ER closures from coast to coast — a phenomenon that is putting even greater pressure on emergency departments that remain open.
Smart says hospitals across the country are dealing with an influx of patients that have limited or no access to family doctors or primary care.
“Absolutely, some of the volume that we’re seeing in the emergency department is related to the fact that many people are now having to use the emergency department as a place to access care,” Smart said.
