B.C. has recruited hundreds of family doctors. It's still not enough

When Jennie Passche gets sick, she finds herself in a competition to get care.

The 65-year-old in Esquimalt, on B.C.'s Vancouver Island, says she has to wake up early to call her community's urgent and primary care centre, which opened in 2021 to provide same-day care and alleviate the family doctor shortage.

But by the time she gets through, she says, it's usually too late.

"It just seems so hopeless. What's going to happen to me? Who am I going to see?"

Passche was taking part in a call-in segment on CBC's BC Today meant to mark a milestone for the province: 1,001 new family care physicians hired over the past two years following changes made to the province's payment model, and a record number of residents – 250,000 – attached to some sort of primary care provider.

But as the phone lines revealed, many more are still desperately seeking care.

One caller said he goes to events where first aid is set up and asks for his pulse to be checked, just to get some peace of mind about his health.

Another said he has a two-year-old child who has never seen a doctor outside of getting basic vaccinations. 

Those stories, said Dr. Tahmeena Ali, are both "heartbreaking" and all too common.

"I see those struggles," Ali, past president of B.C. Family Doctors, told host Michelle Eliot.

She said when working hospital shifts, she comes across people with delayed diagnoses, including for serious maladies such as cancer, "because they were simply bumped from walk-in to walk-in" with no access to ongoing care.

Ali says while the recent changes and new hires are heartening, there's still a long way to go.

According to B.C.'s Ministry of Health, there are still roughly 400,000 people still waiting for a family doctor, which means more than 4,000 more would need to be hired using current patient ratios. 

From Dr. Ali's perspective, "that's simply not possible." Instead, she said, there needs to be a complete rethink of a health-care system based around the notion that every person in the country can have regular access to a family doctor.