I wanted to reach out and thank you for your editorial on the Cochrane Primary Care closure. It is hard to believe that a whole year has passed since the majority of the doctors in our town took time out of their busy schedules in the midst of a pandemic to respond to our MLA’s blatant attack on primary care. In the months preceding that, many of the physicians here had met with our MLA and written to other levels of government with our concerns about the sustainability of primary care with the changes the UCP were enacting. At that time, there was a lot of anger and frustration toward government. We felt that our views were not being heard and that the warning signs were not being heeded. It turns out we were right.
In my case, that anger has now turned to sadness. Daily I receive desperate calls and texts from people in our community, asking if I know of any physicians who will take them on as patients. Many of these people are friends, and it is heartbreaking to turn them away. The strong medical community that was here just one year ago is starting to crumble, and the preventative health benefits of a primary care provider cannot be replaced by urgent care or walk-in clinics (or the virtual care platforms that our government spends health care dollars promoting). These are all stopgaps. They are not solutions.
The time to be proactive has passed. We are now in a reactive state. Retaining the physicians that we had should have been the focus, but now the focus is on recruiting, which takes years to effectively fill the need, and typically costs more. Honestly, recruiting is even more difficult right now due to the hostility the UCP has shown to the health care profession. At the end of it all, it is not our government who suffers— It is our community.
Of note, Mr. Guthrie does not mention working with physicians for recruitment initiatives in his letter addressing the primary care closure, nor does he admit that his government created this crisis. If I could give this government only one piece of advice, it would be to admit that they need to be collaborative in their approach— Listen to the key stakeholders! When they are sounding the alarm, it is for a reason. The warning signs were blatantly obvious to those who are directly involved, and now we all bear the burden of the poor decisions that have been made.
Dr Julie Torrie
