QUEBEC — Family physicians must register nearly one million more patients by Dec. 31, 2017 if they don’t want to see their pay slashed by up to 30 per cent, Health Minister Gaétan Barrette said Tuesday.
Health department figures show the number of Quebecers with a family doctor increased 0.6 per cent between June 30 and Sept. 23, to reach 72.7 per cent.
That’s still short of the 85-per-cent objective the government and family doctors agreed on in June 2015, Barrette noted.
“We have enough doctors in Quebec to deliver the goods,” he said, adding two-thirds of physicians are still not pulling their weight. “It is feasible.”
The minister gave the example of a 40-year-old female doctor he recently met who has three children at home and 2,300 registered patients, about 1,000 more than the average full-time doctor.
“She still has time to come home and eat dinner with her children,” Barrette said. “It can be done. And to my knowledge, that doctor is not a workaholic.”
He added: “Not only are (general practitioners) a bit behind, they are at a turning point. We’re halfway down the agreement and we’re not at half the target.”
Under Bill 20, doctors risk having their pay slashed by up to 30 per cent if they don’t sign up the required number of patients by Dec. 31, 2017.
The law was adopted by the National Assembly in November 2015. It also ends medicare coverage of in vitro fertilization, replacing it with a system of tax credits.
The in vitro regulation took immediate effect, while the change to the number of patients doctors are required to take on was postponed and won’t take effect if doctors meet the targets.
About 5.7 million Quebecers have a family doctor. Barrette said physicians have until the end of 2017 to register 969,662 additional patients. That works out to 64,644 new patients a month, or one or two a day per doctor for the next 225 days.
Louis Godin, head of the federation representing general practitioners, told the Montreal Gazette the increase since June is satisfactory given that summer months are often when doctors choose to retire.
“More than 200 new doctors are arriving and getting settled in. That usually happens in September,” Godin said. “We’re confident that we’re going to reach the targets.”
But he asked that Barrette do his part and ensure the waiting list for family doctors is up-to-date and easy to use. Too often, doctors have tried to recruit patients, only to find the phone numbers are wrong or patients live too far away, Godin said.
The health department says only 10 per cent of family doctors have used the list, which currently counts 492,145 names.
Barrette also cited the “adherence rate,” or doctor availability. The target is for at least 80 per cent of patients’ visits to be to their own physician, as opposed to a walk-in clinic or a hospital. That rate stands at 78.7 per cent.
As registrations of new patients increase, it is possible — but highly undesirable — that the adherence rate will decrease, Barrette warned.
PQ health critic Diane Lamarre said the numbers prove Barrette’s approach is failing.
“It’s a failure of what he promised, and he put all his effort on coercion against physicians, which is not the way to resolve health access and certainly not to give patients access to care,” she said.
François Paradis, health critic for Coalition Avenir Québec, said people phone him to complain they have to wait “three, four, six, eight weeks” for an appointment with their family doctor. Too many of them end up in the emergency room, he said.
