
B.C.'s health-care crisis is unrelenting. What can be done to fix it?
CBC
Situation Critical is a series from CBC British Columbia reporting on the barriers people in this province face in accessing timely and appropriate health care.
Vancouver Island resident Joy Williamson hasn't had a family doctor for 10 years.
During that time, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
While she's undergoing treatment right now, she worries about what will happen once that treatment is over, particularly if the cancer returns.
"I will be released not having a [general practitioner]. That really concerns me."
Her story is all too familiar in B.C.
An estimated one in five — nearly a million — British Columbians do not have a family doctor, and that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the health-care crisis in B.C.
Emergency rooms in rural communities have been forced to close. Wait times for emergency and specialized care continue to climb, and a lack of paramedics has had severe, sometimes fatal consequences.
WATCH | "No short-term fixes" to health-care crisis, says family physician
Allan Greenwood's sister Lorrie Williams suffered a stroke last month and waited an hour for an ambulance, despite living just minutes away from the hospital in New Westminster.
She's now partially paralyzed, and Greenwood is worried about her future.
"I'm angry at the people who get paid to look after the system, who aren't doing their job, who allowed it to get to this condition. And people are going to continue to get brain damage or die because the ambulance isn't there. When you need an ambulance, you need an ambulance."
Michael Mort, 82, who suffers from cardiac and neurological conditions, was suddenly without a doctor after his retirement in Victoria last year. His wife, Janet Mort, went so far as to put an ad in the local newspaper looking for a care provider. Luckily for Mort, it worked.
"Michael's life was in my hands," Janet Mort said. "There was nobody else what was going to help him, except me."

The longtime music director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra says his recent battle with a recurrence of non-Hodgkin lymphoma would've been easier if he could've received a stem-cell transplant in Windsor instead of London — something that is now possible for some patients thanks to a new program at the Windsor Regional Hospital.