New survey finds widespread frustration with access to primary health care

A new National survey has found Canadians to be deeply frustrated with Primary Health Care in this country a 72-page report found evidence of what it calls an attachment crisis that an estimated 22% of adults don’t have a regular family doctor or nurse practitioner that problem is worse with

Young adults and in some provinces like Quebec and those in Atlantic Canada the report calls on governments to accelerate licensing of foreign trained Health Care Professionals and train and recruit more people to work in Primary Care I want to bring in Canada tonight’s medical contributor Dr Samir Gupta for

His thoughts on this Dr Gupta welcome to good to see you you to Sarah um yeah I think yeah go go ahead well stands out to you when you hear about the number of people who are so frustrated I mean I that’s a lot of people who don’t have

Primary Care access yeah it’s something Sarah we’ve talked about on this show and and I think it it kind of puts numbers and some objective data around what we’ve subjectively what what you hear people in the community saying what what I as a doctor hear my patients

Saying uh and what we hear about in The Press which is this just this massive number of people and in this report it’s 6 and a half million Canadians who don’t have regular access to a family doctor you know a place they can call home a place where somebody knows their history

And and somebody can see them regularly um and that’s over 20% of Canadians and also what comes out is to your point it’s the frustration and this is this is the number one thing if you ask about you know what can we fix you know what’s

The reform that we need it’s access and that’s you know that’s what comes across across geographies across demographics that’s what everybody’s concerned about as their number one frustration we want access to a primary care physician Dr gupto what kind of impact Can it have healthwise on this as you

Say massive group of people who don’t have this access to a health care professional yeah it’s it’s very concerning you know uh I think the obvious thing is when you you need someone for a problem you’re having acutely you don’t have someone and so in some cases people will end up in the

Emergency room and that has impacts on other parts of the Health Care System um but we often forget about the very important preventative role that family doctors play know family doctors do a lot and they’re they’re sort of the quarterback for somebody’s care and somebody might be seeing two or three

Different Specialists but the family doctor is a person who brings it all together um but they also do a lot of routine preventative stuff they will do screening stuff they will sometimes prevent diseases from occurring but very importantly they’ll identify diseases early and treat them so that they

Prevent them from progressing and so there are a lot of long-term Health consequences from not having that at an early stage when we talk about increasing the workforce and that is build as one of the solutions here how quickly can something like that actually happen and how much does that

Cost yeah I mean it’s it takes six years to train a family physicians four four year years of medical school and two years of residency uh a little bit faster is getting current medical students to look at Family Practice as a career and to do that we’re going to

Have to make it more attractive we’re going to have to make uh work life balance better work conditions better um but even more immediate is the possibility of bringing foreign trained Physicians back into our system uh in many cases those are Canadian Sarah it’s it’s folks who couldn’t get into medical

School here went elsewhere and then due to a lot of red tape couldn’t come back here for their family practice residency or they’re fully trained and can’t come back so that is a faster solution and and yes all these Solutions cost money it costs money to train folks and and to

Employ more doctors but again coming back to the prevention piece this is one of those things in in the health system where that early investment that sort of Stitch in Time can save nine where if you get a family doctor who sees someone and you know for example identifies high

Blood pressure and controls that blood pressure you will save that heart attack or that stroke that could happen five or 10 years down the road that is very expensive for the Health Care system not only obviously very eventful for the patient um but you can ultimately save money by preventing those those events

But you’ve got to make those Investments up front right and that’s a good point okay I want to move on because I know we’re approaching March break um and it has prompted a warning from Canada’s top doctor over the global surge we’re seeing of measles we spoke about this

Last time that we talked you and I uh but what are your concerns as we head into the holiday when it comes to measles yeah particularly concerned and you know I’ll Echo Dr Tam’s concern there that um people are going to be traveling this is when people travel all

Over the world and measles right now is everywhere it’s it’s you know resurging everywhere it’s not just sort of exotic locations anymore uh Europe had a thousand cases in 2022 they had over 40,000 in 20123 so 40-fold increase there uh we’ve heard about outbreaks in France UK Romania uh Austria there there

Outbreaks in all sorts of places so there’s a high chance that Canadians will encounter measles in in their travels this March break and if they’re undervaccinated or unvaccinated they will bring measles back to this country and unfortunately uh we like most countries have had a drop off in routine

Vaccination uh during pandemic times due to disruption of the Health Care system and and a whole bunch of factors uh which means that we probably don’t have thresholds in most parts of the country uh for herd immunity in terms of measel immunity which means if people do bring

It back uh we will very likely see outbreaks in Canada as they are seeing in other parts of the world Canada tonight medical contributor Dr Samir Gupta in Toronto tonight Dr Gupta thank you yeah my pleasure

Canada Tonight medical contributor, Dr. Samir Gupta, discusses a new study which found an estimated 22 per cent of Canadian adults — about 6.5 million people — do not have a family doctor or nurse practitioner they can see regularly.

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