British Columbia now has more family doctors than any other province in Canada, by a wide margin.
The question is, how much does that matter?
The Primary Care Report released on Aug. 8 by the provincial government showed that there are now 138 family doctors per 100,000 residents in the province. That's up from 129.1 GPs in 2017, a pretty sizable increase.
It also compares well to other large provinces. Quebec has 130.1, Alberta 116.1, Saskatchewan 118.4, and Ontario a fairly meagre 110.1 per 100,000 people.
Also since 2017, 750,000 more people have found a family doctor or nurse practitioner. The number of nurse practitioners has ballooned. Payment for family doctors has been reformed and more physicians are taking up general practioner status. According to the recent provincial numbers, 76 per cent of all B.C. residents have a primary care doctor or nurse practitioner.
Obviously, the NDP government is crowing about these improvements, while the opposition B.C. Conservatives continue slamming their handling of health care.
In the weeks before the announcement about family doctors, the Conservatives took shots at the lack of ambulance paramedics, shortages of staff for maternity wards, and the ongoing mental health and addictions crisis.
Health care issues in B.C. 鈥� and across Canada, we are far from unique in having a shortage of doctors 鈥� has been a problem for well over a decade, and its roots go back even farther.
It's also true that just adding more doctors can't always fix things. Doctors, for example, work fewer hours than they did a generation ago. It's like they want to have lives that don't involve looking at sick people 18 hours a day or something!
We know that adding more doctors and nurses isn't enough on its own.
But it is something. It is progress, and frankly, it's pretty good progress over the last eight years. We aren't going to get out of this mess just by hiring more doctors, but we definitely aren't going to get out of it without hiring a lot more doctors.
Sometimes, you have to actually admit when things are going in the right direction. This is one of those times.
Congratulations, to the doctors and nurses and yes, even the bureaucrats on this one.
Now go find another hundred doctors.
