Struggles facing family doctors are real

To the 15,000 family doctors in Ontario, I want to say: I hear you. I hear the young family doctor, the sole breadwinner for her family with two young children, who is adding another half-day to her practice because two colleagues are retiring and there is no one to take over their patients. I hear the doctor who is burned out by the unrelenting demands of the pandemic and needs a break but can’t find a locum. The only solution she has come up with is to write a letter to her patients saying she is going away for a while. I hear the doctor who has practiced for 30 years, staring at the bottle of anti-depressants on her desk, who has never told anyone that she is part of this mental health tsunami crashing on our shores. As president of the Ontario Medical Association, I am hearing from you every day about the struggles you are facing as we emerge from the biggest public health crisis in our memory. Your challenges are real as you struggle to care for your patients. Read: ‘Hopeful and optimistic': New OMA president is keen to tackle physician burnout System-wide problems in the healthcare system that existed before COVID-19 have widened during the pandemic. Patients are re-engaging with the healthcare system and many are showing up sicker and with more complex conditions requiring more advanced care. We’re seeing this not just in emergency departments, which are in the news for record volumes, but in community clinics, where primary care physicians are working to find the appropriate balance between in-person and virtual care. A new OMA analysis of OHIP billing data says it’s about 60-40, which happens to be the target the government set for primary care physicians in the new Physician Services Agreement. Ontario’s doctors have a plan for fixing the healthcare system, Prescription for Ontario: Doctors’ 5-Point Plan for Better Health Care. It includes detailed recommendations in five key areas: reducing the backlog of services and wait times; expanding mental health and addiction programs in the community; improving and expanding home care and other community care; strengthening public health and pandemic preparedness; and giving every patient a team of healthcare providers who are linked digitally. But these are complicated system-wide issues that will take time to fix. There are things we can do in the short term, to let doctors be doctors and focus on what they do best: spending time with patients. Family doctors are the bedrock of the healthcare system. In addition to providing preventative, diagnostic and primary care, you are the gateway to speciality care. But expectations of what we can do have grown over the years, disproportionate to our training and what we thought our practices would look like and what our patients need. To start with, we need to: Deal with the administrative burden. Primary care physicians spend about six hours a day recording patient information electronically, both during and after clinic hours. Address burnout among all healthcare workers. Connect electronic medical records systems used by physicians, hospitals, labs and pharmacists. Help doctors take vacations, parental leave or educational opportunities, by making locums more attractive, accrediting foreign-trained physicians and implementing a national licensure program. Patients trust us to show up for work in the morning refreshed and driven by empathy. I know we have the innate capacity to do that but our best work requires a functional healthcare system. I want us to practice the medicine we dreamed we would practice when we felt we had won the lottery by getting accepted to medical school. Dr. Rose Zacharias is the president of the Ontario Medical Association.

Struggles facing family doctors are real

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