Dr Alan Grill is chief of family medicine at the hospital in Markham stoval outside of Toronto in Ontario uh Dr Grill always good to see you surprised or Not by these numbers and what’s the takeaway so I’m not surprised at all and in fact uh these numbers are not good
The kaii study is showing that there are several million people across Canada that don’t have access to a family physician we can also include other primary care providers in there like nurse practitioners and this is something that not should be the standard that Canadians expect in fact it’s quite embarrassing you know having
A family physician shouldn’t be a luxury it should be a right and can you imagine if uh Public Schools told children living across Canada that there wasn’t room for them and they couldn’t get an education like it’s it’s absolutely a ridiculous thought and I think that
There’s two main issues that we have to talk about with regards to this data one is what are the unintended consequences for patients who don’t have a family physician and number two how are we going to solve some of the health system challenges that are being faced by
Family Physicians so we can not only help retain them in the profession but we can continue to recruit more medical students and residents to go into Family Medicine yeah what’s the issue with that why uh you know grads are not interested or less interested perhaps is a better
Way to put it Dr Grill of going into Family Medicine so I think what’s happening is the there are Health System challenges faced by Family Physicians across Canada you know I speak to my colleagues in many different provinces and a lot of them are facing the same
Thing so number one there’s a huge administrative burden on Family Positions so there was a study that was done that shows on average most Family Physicians are spending 19 hours a week on things like paperwork filling out forms you know sick notes for patients because their employer needs them to get
A note before they go back to work you know chasing down referrals to Specialists when sometimes they get rejected and you know that’s almost two days a week and that’s outside of sitting in front of a patient providing care when I was in training we were
Trained to take to look after people and to help them that’s what we love to do spending all this extra hours on paperwork is a big problem and that’s one of I think the reasons why in the kaii study a lot of people had trouble with same day appointments how can you
Get into your doctor on the same day when they’re doing 19 hours of paperwork it’s it’s hard to offer everything number two there isn’t enough team-based care so you know you have some solo docs that are working really hard just to manage their practice ractice and then
You have other practices like mine where I’ve got social workers and I’ve got dieticians to help carry the load and offer an urgent care service right so we can see our patients in the evenings and on the weekends so they don’t end up in emerge which is another thing the paper
Showed and then finally the cost of running an office just like in other professions is going up Staffing supplies rent and our our income has not sort of gone up with the cost of expenses based on most provincial um uh agreements with government so I think those are three major challenges facing
Recruitment and Retention in Family Medicine Dr Grill always good to have you part of our coverage today uh thank you for coming on CTV and giving us your thoughts on this one in this survey my pleasure
Ontario physician Dr. Allan Grill says he’s ‘not surprised’ by the survey’s findings of poor accessibility to primary health care in Canada.
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