Massive new survey finds widespread frustration with access to primary health care
Massive new survey finds widespread frustration with access to primary health care
Better keep voting for governments who are determined to make it worse then. Why do so many Canadians want better public services yet vote Conservative? There seems to be a disconnect.
There absolutely is. Parties encourage people to treat elections like a sport and identify with a "side." Corporate media play along with the horse race paradigm, rather than pushing back on this kind of framing that distracts from actual issues. (And heavens forbid we talk about conflicts of interest, especially when they cross party lines and are endemic to entire governments-- ruling and opposition parties alike.)
It's been increasingly normalized for vast swathes of the voting public to pay little to no attention what each party stands for now, and what they've done in the past. Media also fails to give fair attention to a variety of methods by which a given crisis could be tackled, since the interests of the corporate world tend not to be in line with the interest of the public.
It was the provincial liberals who started making things way worst in Quebec. Not that voting for different neo-cons would yield different results.
Mind you John-James Charest used to be an actual "Progressive Conservative".
I was a member of the panel they had for BC (citizen panel, we weren't experts), if anyone has questions.
I'm in BC, and technically have a family doctor... and it sucks. My doctor is only seeing patients a couple of days per week, so appointments are currently booking out around 4 months. There's ONE walk-in clinic where I live (Nanaimo), and they take a limited number of patients per day - they put out signs on a Saturday morning like "Only accepting 10 patients today" (I have a photo of this one to prove it). TThe ER is backup up so bad, you could die before they even triage you (18h or longer wait is normal). The staff at the Critical Care unit in the neighboring Parksville yells at you and tells you to go back to Nanaimo (it's happened to both my wife and I at different times... and we both actually needed medical care). We've ended up driving to Port Alberni or Courtenay for medical care... or in my case, I'm travelling for business and have booked a doctor visit in another damn country to get some checkup work done because I can't get it done locally... OK, I can get it, but the local wait times are so fucking long that I can book a flight, fly overseas and see a doctor, get my results and be back home a month before I'd even start the process with my family doctor.
Talkign with the parents at the local school... many are afraid that their kids will catch something... and thehy won't be able to see a doctor to get the help they need
So yeah.. there's widespread frustration :-P
Yeah this was a disturbingly common theme in what many of the other panel members were experiencing. Canada has a great public healthcare system - if you have a family doctor (who isn't overbooked). I do feel some optimism though as it seems like this current provincial government is actually making changes that are causing things to head in the right direction, but our panel had a lot of other suggestions that would help alleviate some of the burden on family doctors (the tl;dr is that family doctors provide way more care than they did 50 years ago and are also overburdened with paperwork, on top of an antiquated business model where they have to run a business with employees, bookkeeping, etc.)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A Toronto-based research team met with and surveyed some 10,000 Canadians about the state of the health-care system — and what they found is deep dissatisfaction and frustration with primary care as the country grapples with a severe shortage of family doctors.
The OurCare Initiative — led by Dr. Tara Kiran, a family doctor and scientist with the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at Toronto's St. Michael's Hospital — conducted a national survey, assembled five "provincial priorities panels" and convened a series of community roundtables over the past 16 months.
It's one of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on Canadians' views of the health system and it provides crucial data on the poor state of primary care access in a growing and aging country.
The report found evidence of what it calls an "attachment crisis" — 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.
The OurCare report concludes that the best way to solve Canadians' crisis of confidence in primary care is with a relatively straightforward, if elusive, fix: bring in more doctors and nurse practitioners.
The federal government's latest health accord with the provinces — and a series of bilateral side deals — amount to a meaningful improvement but they don't deliver all the country needs, Kiran said.
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