Family physicians struggling to pay the costs of running their clinics, crushed under huge patient loads, are sending out an SOS ahead of the Feb. 29 provincial budget.
On Wednesday, 24 family physicians providing comprehensive cradle-to-grave care shared the state of their practices — one story every hour for 24 hours — through Alberta Medical Association social media.
“It’s desperate. This is an SOS. We need the 2024 budget to have money to have a funding model to keep our physicians,” said Dr. Paul Parks, president of the Alberta Medical Association.
He said British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are all paying their family doctors $100,000 to $150,000 more a year, and a recent AMA survey showed 61 per cent of Alberta family doctors are considering leaving the province’s health care system.
“It’s not an idle threat. We’ve polled our members. They are saying they will not renew their leases.”
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He said Alberta’s family physicians are the lowest paid specialists in Alberta and Western Canada and something must be done so their practices remain viable.
“It’s absurd that my family medicine specialists can make more money doing Botox than they can to do comprehensive, difficult care. That’s the incentive structure we have right now.”
Parks said in rural Alberta, family doctors have to juggle their practice around shifts at the local hospital and some are choosing to close their practices.
When communities lose a family doctor, all the health care services they provide are lost, said Dr. Michelle Morros of Edmonton, who is a family medicine residency and program director at the University of Alberta.
“When we hear about emergency departments having to close for the weekend, or we hear about patients having to travel kilometres away, hundreds of kilometres sometimes to deliver their baby, that’s not because there weren’t emergency doctors or obstetricians,” said Morros whose video is included in the AMA’s SOS campaign.
“That’s because there weren’t family doctors because it’s actually the family doctors that are delivering all of that care in the rural communities.”
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On Wednesday, Health Minister Adriana LaGrange said in an online post that the government knows there is an immediate need to address the concerns in primary care.
“Over the past four months alone we have committed to $200 million in stabilization funding, and $57 million over three years to provide family doctors and nurse practitioners with support to help manage their increasing number of patients. This is in addition to the negotiated increase to the AMA contract agreement finalized 15 months ago which is valued at approximately $780 million over 4 years,” the post said.
Parks said the AMA wants to work with the province.
“We’re pleased and happy about the investments that are being made and the announcement of $200 million that will come over the next 2 years in federal funding to help our family physicians,” said Parks who meets with the LaGrange on Friday.
”That was an initial start. It begins the process of stabilization so we can create a funding model that will be able to support our colleagues to do the kind of care we know Albertans want and deserve.”
But if significant funding to fix the primary care system is not included in the budget, many doctors will close their practices. Some are already planning their exit, he said.
“Many are already silently quitting, in the sense of slowly closing their comprehensive practice. They don’t see the funding model and the hope coming.”
szielinski@reddeeradvocate.com
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