Concerns grow over dwindling family doctor availability in Alberta

Alberta doctors are again raising concerns about access to family physicians throughout the province.

According to data from Alberta's Find a Doctor website — which is managed by Alberta's Primary Care Networks (PCNs) — the number of family physicians accepting new patients via the website from 2020 to 2023 decreased by 79 per cent.

Across Alberta, there were 887 family doctors on the website who were accepting new patients in 2020. Now, as of September 2023, there are only 190.

In a Sept. 25 thread posted on X, formerly Twitter, the Alberta Medical Association (AMA) says that Minister of Health Adriana LaGrange joined the AMA Representative Forum meeting the previous weekend to discuss primary care, which the AMA referred to as a "crisis."

"We are bleeding out. We must retain the physicians we have and restore Alberta's reputation as a destination of choice," the AMA said in the post.

Alberta's PCNs are made up of groups of family doctors that work with allied health professionals operating within a team-based, health-care model. Alberta has 39 PCNs — seven in the Calgary area, and 32 others in the remaining four Alberta Health Zones.

Alberta's PCNs also operate the Find a Doctor website, which as of Friday displayed an alert notifying users of a "limited supply of family physicians."

In a report from Calgary and area PCNs, there were 923,542 visits to the Alberta Find a Doctor website from 2022 to 2023, marking a 29-per-cent increase from the previous year.

The report also notes that there were over 70,000 "clinic connections" in that same time period, which refers to the number of times website users clicked a clinic contact link to find a new doctor, but does not reflect the number of people who were actually able to get one. 

The amount of "clinic connections" also increased, up 42 per cent from the year before.

While the number of Albertans looking for a family doctor "soars," the availability of family physicians accepting new patients "hits new lows," reads the report, which was publicly posted last month.

Keith Bradford, director of communications for Calgary and area PCNs, says the Find a Doctor website's goal is to improve the potential of finding a family doctor in a timely manner.

But being able to search for primary care doesn't necessarily mean more doctor availability.

"Since the site was launched in 2019, the number of doctors taking patients, in all five [health] zones in Alberta, is decreasing year-on-year," he said.