Healtcare (Dis)Connect

A little over a year ago, there was a note of optimism in our editorial about the province’s plans to find a doctor or nurse practitioner for every resident who needed one. Today, it’s hard not to feel a bit cynical about the lack of clear communication and evident progress on this critical issue.

How critical? The capable folks behind the Kawartha Lakes Family Doctor Recruitment initiative have seen the local reality up close as they work to attract and retain health care professionals. According to numbers on their website, about 6,000 people in Kawartha Lakes don’t have a primary care provider.

Even worse, the organization estimates that at least 25,000 more residents travel outside our city to see their doctor. That means, more than one-third of the people of Kawartha Lakes don’t have a doctor here. Just let that sink in for a moment.

Yes, the province’s Health Care Connect (HCC) has made inroads; several thousand people in Haliburton have, in HCC’s wording, been “attached” to primary care. And it’s great to see a professional like Dr. Dennis Darkwa choosing our region — specifically Bobcaygeon — to set up a practice.

But the much-heralded provincial effort is starting to look less like a well-coordinated campaign and more like a scramble that still leaves unattached patients wondering what’s going on. A call to HCC invariably results in a message that it’s experiencing — you guessed it — high call volumes. The caller is often shunted to a voicemail box which may be full and not accepting messages.

Emails are answered with a form response that provides no new information. Perhaps most infuriating of all, HCC letters and emails note that not all nurse practitioners and doctors are, in fact, “automatically connected” to HCC. Prospective patients, it notes, should call to check. As if they haven’t been doing that for months or even years already.

We don’t want to give in to cynicism, honest. What to make, then, of the provincial auditor general’s report noting that at a time when so many don’t have a primary care provider, the province is turning out 44 per cent fewer family doctors than it said it would?

In her recent report, Ontario’s auditor general, Shelley Spence, put it plainly. “Our audit concluded that the ministry, in conjunction with Ontario Health, did not consistently have processes in place to plan and oversee programs and initiatives to improve patients’ access to primary care.” The short version: It’s a good idea, badly executed.

We can all continue to hope that Health Care Connect will succeed, and that everyone in Kawartha Lakes who has no primary care provider will soon have one. To the thousands of you in that position, hang in there.