Family doctors — more specifically, a shortage of them — are shaping up to be a major election issue in New Brunswick.
Alan Price and his wife, Carla, of Campbell Settlement, N.B., are among the 180,000 New Brunswickers without a primary care provider, and they say that very fact will be top of mind come election day: Oct. 21.
“Mine’s health care, for sure,” Price responded, when asked what he considers to be his priority during this campaign.
Price began experiencing strange symptoms last year — one of which was the inability to move his left thumb.
“You’d think I’d had a stroke is what it looked like, really. Left side was going numb, left corner of the mouth would droop,” he recalled.
The couple’s family doctor was on vacation at the time, so he headed to the emergency department of the Upper River Valley Hospital in Waterville to seek help.
He eventually spent 23 hours in the ER, and after a battery of tests and consultation with a neurosurgeon in Saint John, discovered he had a non-cancerous mass in his brain.
Last fall, he underwent surgery to remove the mass and now requires regular monitoring.
But this past July, the couple’s family doctor retired — leaving the Prices to navigate the health-care system alone. They’ve been unable to find a new family doctor, and he describes his situation as being “in limbo.”
“It’s a major thing because where you’ve had a mass removed off your brain, it’s quite an operation. And the type it is, the mass I had, the neurosurgeon said himself, it’s the type that can come back,” he said.
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“Right now, if I started getting symptoms again, basically my only option is to head back to the emergency or phone the neurosurgeon in Saint John and see what he can do.”
Campaign promises to improve health care
On the campaign trail, party leaders have been touting their health plans for the province.
Liberal Leader Susan Holt, campaigning Tuesday in St. Stephen, said the party would change the compensation model for doctors and increase the number of residency spaces for doctors in training.
The Liberal plan also promises to streamline the process for recognizing the credentials of foreign-trained doctors and other health professionals.
“We need to innovate in how we recruit health-care professionals,” Holt said. “A centralized departmental model that continues to focus on vacancies instead of health-care professionals hasn’t worked.”
On Monday, Progressive Conservative Leader Blaine Higgs promised to reduce health-care wait times by expanding the scope of practice of nurse practitioners, registered nurses, registered psychiatric nurses, paramedics and pharmacists.
The Green Party has made an election promise to invest $380 million annually to fix the primary health-care system.
‘Talk is talk’
New Brunswick Medical Society president Dr. Paula Keating is another voter keeping a close eye on health care this election. She says “ideally,” every patient in New Brunswick should have a primary care provider. That’s not the case right now.
“(They need primary care providers) so that they can access care both preventatively over the years to avoid chronic disease developing if possible, and then when they do have either short-term acute illnesses or longer-term health concerns, that they have someone they can call to help treat these illnesses,” Keating said.
In a bid to increase access to care, all three parties represented in the legislature have promised to further collaborative care models — something called for by the medical society.
The model sees different kinds of practitioners working under one roof to provide that care.
“They could see a nurse, they could see a dietitian, they could see a pharmacist,” Keating explained. “The most appropriate person to deal with the issue that they’re having at the time. And this improves access to clinics.”
Meanwhile, Alan Price say he fears they’ll never find another family doctor, and will be left relying on the ER for care.
His message for the political leaders? The province needs more action.
“They do a lot of talk. But talk is talk,” he said.
“But it’s just … how do you bring doctors in? And I mean the whole country’s got the same problem.”
— with a file from The Canadian Press