Alberta government to remove cap on doctor daily visits

When Dr. Omid Pour-Ahmadi arrives each day at the SantiMed Family and Walk-In Clinic in northeast Calgary, he's greeted by a line-up of patients — and some of them have been waiting for hours.

A provincial daily cap on the number of patient visits each doctor can be fully paid for requires patients to arrive early if they want to be seen, Pour-Ahmadi says.

On Monday, all doctors at the clinic had reached their caps by 2 p.m., and staff closed the doors early.

"It's tough. It's really tough," he said.

Earlier Monday, Health Minister Jason Copping announced the government would be removing that visit cap — at least temporarily — until March 2023, while they evaluate the effect of the change. It should cost about $22 million per year.

"The intent was to promote quality care and safety for patients and physicians," Copping said at a virtual news conference Monday. "And those are valid goals. But the impact of the cap was limited, and we think it's outweighed by the need to support access for patients."

The United Conservative Party government introduced the cap, along with other changes unpopular with doctors, when they unilaterally terminated a master agreement with the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) in February 2020 and imposed a new contract.

That contract said doctors who had more than 50 visits with patients per day would get paid half their fee for any additional work, and could charge no fee at all once they saw more than 65 patients. It was supposed to be a cost-saving measure that prevented doctors from burning out.

Copping said Monday it caused problems.

Specialists like ophthalmologists, for example, would perform multiple tasks in a day with each patient, which quickly racked up the number of visits they could bill for.

Meanwhile, doctors say billing codes have stayed relatively flat while inflation drives up their costs of running clinics.

AMA president Dr. Fredrykka Rinaldi said Monday some physicians went out of business, closed their clinics, moved away, or took lower-risk jobs.

It became more difficult to find a family doctor in Alberta. Some clinics tried extending their hours into the evenings to meet demand.

"When you ask physicians to open extra hours, and they've already hit their caps during their daytime hours … we're not Florence Nightingale," Rinaldi said.