A cancer survivor lost her family doctor. Now she's pushing for better access to care
CBC
The Cure is a CBC News series examining strategies that provinces and territories are using to tackle the primary-care crisis across Canada.
Barb Broome was diagnosed with thyroid cancer nine years ago.
The western P.E.I. woman had her thyroid gland and all four parathyroid glands removed, leaving her body unable to regulate the amount of calcium in her system. Without correction, that could be fatal.
For nine years, Broome had a family doctor to help her navigate her changing calcium levels through regular blood tests and intravenous infusions.
She had no idea how difficult that would be to manage after her doctor retired last November.
"I really didn't know what to expect... or how this was going to work, or how to use the Maple system," she said, referring to the private online medical service she's able to access at government expense, as one of 38,006 Prince Edward Islanders with no primary-care provider as of Feb. 28 of this year.
"It was all new to me. And I thought, 'Oh God, you know, it can't be that bad. There's got to be a nurse practitioner. There's got to be somewhere to go.'
"There isn't, you know. There really isn't."
Broome has been forced to become her own health-care manager and advocate. She has to request her own copies of blood work results, then provide those every two weeks to an internist in Summerside who reviews them.
But Broome says her internist has made it clear that she really needs a family doctor.
"Where do I go from here? Like, where am I getting the results?" Broome said. "Who's gonna follow up with this if there is more to be done? And that's the question that would normally go to your family doctor and you would go from there. And I have nowhere for that to go."
In the nine years that she was managing her condition with the help of her family doctor, Broome was hospitalized three times. In the first four months after losing her doctor, she said, she was hospitalized four times.
"That kind of, to me, speaks volumes on what the need is here," she said.
"I wouldn't have to be at that emergency department or taking up space in that hospital if I had a family doctor and we could work this out to be a little bit better."
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The Cure is a CBC News series examining strategies that provinces and territories are using to tackle the primary-care crisis across Canada.
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