How B.C. is solving the family doctor shortage

I belong to several Facebook groups for my neighbourhood in midtown Toronto. By far, the most common type of post is from someone looking for a new family doctor. The shortage is real: some 6.5 million Canadians don’t have a primary care physician, and that number will only mushroom as more boomer-age GPs near retirement. In Ontario, 40 per cent of family doctors are planning to leave the profession in the next five years, while in Alberta that number hovers closer to 60 per cent. Meanwhile, the number of Canadian medical students choosing family medicine is the lowest it’s been in more than a decade. Unlike medical specialists, who work within hospital systems, family doctors are essentially small business owners, responsible for the staff, rent, supplies and paperworks at their practices. For many of them, the pay isn’t worth the work.

British Columbia, however, is bucking the trend: in the last year, the province has attracted more than 700 new family physicians. Some of them are even doctors who’d previously left family medicine and have now returned. The solution is simple: a new payment model. Instead of a flat-rate fee for service, as deployed in most other provinces, B.C.’s new longitudinal family physician payment plan also compensates doctors for time spent with patients and complexity of the care required. “The federal government estimates that we need 48,900 more family doctors by 2031 to keep up with demand. writes Renée Fernandez, executive director of B.C. Family Doctors, in her Big Idea piece for Maclean’s. “This payment model is just the start.”

–Emily Landau, executive editor

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