Re: Primary-care crisis has put family physicians in impossible position
I will soon be 65 years old and am in my 39th year of a busy family medicine practice. I am privileged and humbled to have had a career that allows me to build relationships of trust with so many people, and to be part of the best and worst times of their lives. As your feature articulated, the decision to retire without securing a replacement is tremendously difficult and heart-wrenching.
When I started practice in 1985, it wasn’t like this. If a doctor decided to retire, there was always a new grad that took over. We are in our present predicament for one reason only: the specialty of family medicine has been ignored, misunderstood and, most importantly, completely undervalued by decision-making and advisory entities within the Canadian health-care system.
The result of this is family doctors are struggling to meet the needs of patients within a model of care established in the 1960s, deluged with paperwork and administrative duties, and being paid about half of what an average specialist earns. It’s no surprise that medical students today are savvy enough to look at this and ask themselves if that’s what they want for the next 30-40 years.
Certainly the change to team-based care is necessary and will make a difference. But we’re dealing with bureaucracy, so it will be decades before this plays out. In New Brunswick, we initiated talks with the government about this a dozen years ago. They had zero interest and now they are putting band-aid solutions together to try to deliver care.
It’s a classic case of our elected officials not listening to the experts. This is what happens when government officials think they can run health care.
Mary Jarratt, MD, Saint John, N.B.
