By Matt Goerzen
Centretown pediatricians say they aren’t accepting new patients and warn the situation will get worse before it gets better.
“We’re talking about a group of people that are all in our 60s, and we’re getting very run down,” says Dr. William James, a pediatrician who practices on Kent Street.
He describes the situation in one word: “Dreadful.”
He estimates there are only three other full-time and five part-time pediatricians in the Centretown area. Two have retired in the past year and two more are set to leave in the next two years, James adds.
“You could call every pediatrician in town and I bet there’s not one that will take on a new patient,” he says, adding the only hope for parents is to get a referral from a family doctor – and they are almost as difficut to find as pediatricians.
The problem is rooted in the health-care system, says James. The cost of doing business outweighs the profits and so young doctors are pursuing different kinds of medicine or practicing elsewhere.
“The impact is that people aren’t getting doctors and they aren’t getting the quality of care they deserve,” he says. “If you can’t get a pediatrician and can’t get a family doctor, what are you going to do?”
Dr. Hazem Hamdy is a family doctor on James Street.
“We are very few,” he says. “Most of the doctors are now in the suburbs and the ones that close their offices are not replaced.”
Hamdy says the problem is systemic. “A lot of the new graduates don’t stay, or they work in a walk-in clinic because it’s easier, or they go south of the border,” he says.
Hospital emergency rooms and community walk-in clinics take the extra burden, but they cannot provide the continuous care and familiarity of a specialized doctor, says Debbie Tirrul, a nurse practitioner at the Somerset West Community Health Centre walk-in clinic.
“At walk-ins you get acute care, and it ends there,” she says. “If you have continuity of care you tell your story once to one person who knows you. You get better care, you get comprehensive care.”
The problem is most significant in its effects on children. Emergency rooms and walk-in clinics can only fix urgent problems, not long-term ones, and family doctors often do not have the expertise required to deal with some specialized problems that require long-term care.
Sometimes children just plain need a pediatrician, she says.
Coleen Schingh felt the effects when she tried to find a pediatrician for her daughter.
“I think I waited over a year,” she says, adding her family doctor worked “overtime” to find a pediatrician but had to resort to waiting lists.
“[My daughter] was going without care, there was no care, things just weren’t being addressed,” says Schingh. “It was beyond [our] family doctor’s abilities.”
Schingh works as a nurse and says the problem is just one among many in a health care system gone awry.
“We all know what the solution is,” she says. “Money, just plain old money.”