Patients say getting a doctors appointment in Red Lake is like trying to win the lottery

This is the second story about how the ongoing doctor shortage in Red Lake, Ont. is affecting the people who live there. Follow this link to read the first story, on the impacts on the doctors serving the community. 

It's a sunny weekday in mid-September and the waiting room of the Goldcorp Regional Red Lake Medical Centre is eerily quiet.. 

The local family medicine clinic in the northwestern Ontario community is a bright, spacious modern building across from the Margaret Cochenour Memorial Hospital.

But these days, there are frequently too few doctors available to staff it, according to Dr. Daniel Gow, an emergency physician in Fergus, Ont., who works around 10 weeks per year in Red Lake and who has volunteered to help do physician scheduling there.

"If we have two physicians in all of Red Lake, they'll be working back-to-back covering the emergency department. There'll be no urgent care. There'll be no primary care," he said.

"So the clinic itself is what tends to suffer the most in this scenario."

Red Lake, like many small towns across northern Ontario, has struggled with a doctor shortage that has grown dire since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic a few years ago. 

Last year, its hospital was the first in Ontario in recent history to temporarily close its emergency room for 24 hours due to a lack of available physicians. Later on that summer, other hospitals across the province did the same. 

Now the community is dealing with the fallout from a decision to cut funding the town's physician complement from seven full-time-equivalents to six – the result of a province-wide review of physician staffing complements in towns with RNPGA contracts, a type of funding model under which doctors sign on to collectively provide needed services for a community. It prompted one doctor to resign, saying he wants no part of a collapsing system; and a second to announce plans to drop to part-time hours.

The remaining physicians have reduced their workload by closing the urgent care clinic that used to take place on Saturday mornings and informing the community that they will no longer respond to messages by phone or email.

At the same time, they are requiring patients to make telephone appointments for prescription renewals instead of simply processing phone or fax requests from the pharmacy.

Doctors' work of filling out those prescriptions "off the side of their desks" doesn't get captured by the Ministry of Health, possibly contributing to the perception that the community could make do with fewer doctors, explained Dr. Akila Whiley.

But appointments are hard to come by in Red Lake. 

"There's times you phone and there's no answer," said Debbie Kozie, a patient of the clinic who has lived in the town her entire life. "It's like trying to win the lottery. You just keep calling and calling and calling till your call gets answered."