Faced with an aging population requiring increasingly complex care, overwhelmed Canadian doctors are feeling more and more frustrated by their inability to properly serve their patients' health needs, a national survey of physicians reports.
In the survey of more than 20,000 doctors and doctors-in-training from across the country, 75 per cent reported that inadequate funding of the health-care system and an undersupply of physicians and other health professionals, along with paperwork and bureaucracy, are curtailing the amount and level of care they want to provide patients.
While that attitude was expressed by all the specialties, it is perhaps most pronounced among family physicians, simply because of their number and the nature of their practice, said Calvin Gutkin, executive director and CEO of the College of Family Physicians of Canada.
Almost half of Canada's roughly 60,000 doctors are family practitioners, and it's usually the specialty seen most often by patients, he said.
"I think the frustration remains related to just the capacity within the family medicine community to address all of the needs of the population," said Dr. Gutkin, whose organization conducts the triennial survey jointly with the Canadian Medical Association and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.
"Physicians in most communities across the country are doing their best to try to see as many patients as they can," he said. "But still many of them have had to ... limit the number of new patients they can take. And we have community after community with patients who are unable to access a family physician for themselves or for their families.
"And the family physicians themselves are aware of this and are very frustrated by this."
In fact, an estimated four million to five million Canadians do not have a family doctor, and physician groups lay the blame in part on a woefully understaffed health-care system.
CMA president Brian Day said the survey shows that about 4,000 doctors plan to retire in the next two years and medical school graduates will barely cover that loss. As well, 35 per cent of physicians surveyed said they plan to slow down and cut back on their practice.
To bring Canada's health system up to global standards, the country would immediately need to add 26,000 doctors, Dr. Day said from Vancouver. "That's not going to happen."
Besides further increasing medical school openings, Dr. Day said, government should make certification easier for the 1,500 doctors trained outside the country each year.
Louise Samson, president of the RCPSC, said more specialists are also needed to meet the growing needs of the patient population, which is getting older, living longer and beset by more complex health issues as a result.
As a radiologist in Montreal, Dr. Samson sees first-hand the long wait patients have for MRIs and CT scans because there are not enough technicians to perform the tests or radiologists to interpret the results.
"Despite government investments to achieve reduced wait times in priority areas such as cancer treatment, heart procedures, diagnostic imaging, joint replacements and sight restoration, the survey reveals that progress has been quite uneven," she said.
The survey also showed that only about a quarter of doctors are using electronic records to enter and retrieve patient information.
Although progress is being made in electronic record-keeping, secure and reliable systems are not widely in place, Dr. Gutkin said, leaving most doctors to deal with far less efficient means of storing and sharing patient information.
The doctors' groups are calling on the federal, provincial and territorial governments to:
Continue to address the education, training, recruitment and retention of physicians to ensure a sustainable work force that is ready to meet the changing health needs of Canadians;
Implement a co-ordinated, Canada-wide approach to educating, training, recruiting and retaining enough physicians to meet the needs of an aging population.
