I was disappointed but not surprised after reading Lana Popham’s profile piece in the Sept. 4 Saanich News. While she listed housing, addictions and health care as hot topics, she didn’t provide any details on how she would, as my MLA, address these serious issues beyond suggesting perhaps yet another underperforming and understaffed Urgent Primary Care Centre. I think anyone who has tried to get an appointment at one would agree with my assessment.
I had written to Minister Popham in May 2022 asking what she would do to help her constituents find a family physician. In the end, I felt I received no meaningful answer other than an invitation to join the Health-Connect-Registry which I had already done.
In my letter, I had suggested to Minster Popham that the NDP government needed to drastically increase the number of medical residency positions in the province.
While the NDP government estimated 5,000 family physicians were working in primary care in 2023, incredibly, they only funded a total of 186 residency positions to train more. This is hardly adequate given the startling number of people who have no family doctor. In five years, the NDP has only added 16 positions while B.C.'s population has continued to increase by about half a million people. The NDP government just does not seem to grasp the scope of this problem.
There also would be no problem in finding qualified medical school graduates to fill additional residency positions. Many of these young doctors were trained in places such as Ireland and the United Kingdom, as they were unable to secure one of the limited seats at a Canadian medical school. All doctors are matched to residency positions by the Canadian Resident Matching Service which gives B.C. access to any new doctor who has graduated in Canada or elsewhere in the world from an accredited program. In 2023 over 1,000 of these fully qualified new physicians did not match to a residency position in Canada. That is absurd.
Many are young Canadians who want to come home and practice medicine here and the critical lack of residency positions is preventing this. This is a pool that we should be utilizing, and the provincial government should be making this happen.
On a final note, I never heard from the Health-Connect-Registry but I was one of the lucky few to find a family doctor myself with no help from Minster Popham or the NDP government. We all deserve better than this.
Bruce Kennedy
Saanich
