More doctors alone can't fix B.C.'s health-care system: report
British Columbia has more family doctors per capita than it did 40 years ago, ac‐ cording to a new report, but its lead author says try‐ ing to find one or get an ap‐ pointment can still feel as difficult as competing for tickets to Taylor Swift's highly sought-after Eras Tour.
B.C. has 270 doctors for every 100,000 people in 2022, up from 162 doctors per capi‐ ta in 1976, according to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information shared in a new report from charity Generation Squeeze on Thursday.
It's tied with Nova Scotia for the highest rate in Canada, according to the report, and well above the national aver‐ age of 244 doctors per 100,000.
The data may be surpris‐ ing given close to one million British Columbians are esti‐ mated to be without a family doctor, says co-author Dr. Paul Kershaw, but he says it indicates that hiring more doctors isn't a silver bullet to reduce wait times and im‐ prove patient care and out‐ comes.
"Medical care doesn't even account for a quarter of what makes us healthy ... our health begins where we're born, grow, live, work and age," said Kershaw, who is al‐ so the founder of non-profit
Generation Squeeze.
"And that means when we can't access affordable and safe homes, when we can't ac‐ cess quality child care ... those are the things that are going to make us get injured or fall sick and have us needing more time in our clinics and our emergency rooms."
Kershaw says while there are more family doctors prac‐ tising in B.C. now than 40 years ago, more and more people need their services.
"It's kind of like getting ac‐ cess to the doctors is like a Taylor Swift concert, because there's too many of us in the line," he added.
As the province prepares to table its budget next week, the report calls for govern‐ ments of all levels to fund af‐ fordable housing, child care, education and living wages, which Kershaw says hasn't kept up, proportionately, with spending on medical care for when people are already sick.
"We've been growing the medical side disproportion‐ ately, but leaving the invest‐ ments in child care slower, in housing slower, in poverty re‐ duction slower," the Genera‐ tion Squeeze founder said. "Solving the affordability crisis is as much a health issue as it is a wallet issue."
CBC reached out to the provincial Ministry of Health for comment on the report but did not hear back before publication.
Patients displaying more complex symptoms
While B.C. has more doc‐ tors per capita now than in the last four decades, the numbers don't paint the full picture, according to Dr. Joshua Greggain, the former president of Doctors of B.C.
"I acknowledge that the number looks to be more than we've ever had before but ... the patients have never been older or more compli‐ cated," he told CBC News.
"Medicine is more compli‐ cated than it was 50 years ago in the '70s or even '80s ... and so it takes more people to provide that level of complex‐ ity."
A recent study found pa‐ tients in B.C. are coming to doctors with increasingly complex conditions.
The study, published in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal last month, found that patients arriving in B.C. hospitals are older, have more complex medical needs, and are on more prescription medications than two decades ago.
Greggain said family physi‐ cians in B.C. are attempting to keep up with more patients with complex needs, but it would likely take time for in‐ vestments into the healthcare system to bear fruit.
He pointed to last year's implementation of a new compensation model for family doctors, as well as the creation of multidisciplinary clinics and community health centres, as steps towards a better primary care system.
"We are making progress in that regard. It's not hap‐ pening immediately - because it's been 30 or 40 years of ero‐ sion," he said. "We're very op‐ timistic that it's going to happen. It's just not happen‐ ing fast enough quite yet to‐ day."