B.C’s lengthy health care wait times caused by lack of family doctors, expert says

Wait times at two emergency hospitals exceeded seven hours over the weekend and stretched into Monday.

Specifically at B.C. Children’s Hospital and Vancouver General Hospital the length of stay at both emergency wings was over eight hours on Sunday.

9.5 hours wait to be seen at BC Children's ER Sunday morning, and another 8.5 hours length of stay..https://t.co/FYilssawTg #Covid19BC pic.twitter.com/VIuRxOJWDw

— r/Coronavirus_BC (@GreaterfoolVan) May 1, 2022

Dr. Ramneek Dosanjh, the Doctors of BC president, says there is a driving factor leading to these egregious delays.

“I think much of the answer to this is the primary care crisis, where our patients in British Columbia, upwards of 900,000 of our patients don’t have access to a family doctor,” Dr. Dosanjh told City News.

She believes it’s crucial that people living in the province have the opportunity to acquire a family doctor to not only help solve this wait time issue, but also better dictate their own well-being.

“We know that patients with family doctors have better health-care outcomes, and they have earlier detection, prevention, diagnosis and we are seeing with some of our patients who are having misdiagnosis, inaccurate diagnosis or untimely diagnosis.”

Much of the crisis also falls on the province doing their part to source more doctors in family medicine and to keep the ones already working in business she says,

“British Columbians deserve robust primary care, and with that we need a substantial investment in keeping our family doctors that are practicing in their clinics as well recruiting more family physicians.”

She adds the health care system is actively working with the provincial government to find solutions, what those solutions exactly look like is still unclear at this point.

“I truly believe that if we invest in our community care and primary care system it will definitely lessen the burden on our emergency physicians and emergency rooms.”

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Newly appointed BC Liberal leader Kevin Falcon addressed the province Wednesday on the topic of primary care, echoing Dosanjh’s comments calling on B.C. to do a better job of hiring and retaining family doctors.

“They’re dealing with the highest personal income tax rates in North America right here in British Columbia, they’ve got the highest housing prices they have to deal with, that’s a struggle for them and their family’s too. So, all of these affordability issues, plus the pressure, plus the red-tape, make it not worthwhile to be a family doctor. So they’re saying ‘forget it, I’m out.’ Sadly, some of them leave the province entirely, some of them just leave to go practice another form of medicine, but the problem is the patients are paying the price,” said Falcon.

City News has reached out to the health ministry for a response regarding the on-going crisis, though they have yet to comment.

Recent data released by MediaMap, Canada’s most widely used online healthcare platform shows B.C. as having the worst walk-in clinic wait times across the country in 2021.