'It's a slog': Survey finds Sask. trails nation in access to family doctors
CBC
Laura Pfeifer has spent two years looking for a family doctor in Saskatchewan.
But it’s a path the mother of two children, aged seven and 10, has travelled before since moving to Regina from Toronto in 2021, when she also spent two years trying to find a family doctor.
Pfeifer said she and her family had a "fantastic" doctor they "adored" for about eight months, but then she moved away and the family's search started again.
The results of an Angus Reid survey suggest Pfeifer is trying to find a family doctor in the worst place in Canada to do so.
“I think I described it to a friend as the Hunger Games,” Pfeifer said in an interview on Thursday. “It’s like you’re kind of on your own. There’s no real centralized place to find who’s taking [on new patients] or not.”
Pfeifer relies on social media posts and friends in her quest to find a primary care physician, but it’s a lot of work.
She took time off from her job recently to get forms from a doctor’s office when it opened in the morning, after she heard new patients were being accepted.
“It’s a slog,” she said. “And it takes a lot of time and energy.”
The Angus Reid Institute survey of online panelists, which was conducted from Nov. 26 to Dec. 1, found 63 per cent of respondents from Saskatchewan either had no family doctor (22 per cent) or had difficulty accessing their family physician (41 per cent).
That 22 per cent with no family doctor ranks above the national average of 18 per cent, and is second only to Quebec (31 per cent) in the survey.
And the 41 per cent who said they found it difficult to access their current doctor is the highest rate in the country, far exceeding the national number of 32 per cent.
“We have such a low number or ratio of family doctors to citizens that even those that do accept patients, it’s very hard for someone to access a doctor,” NDP Opposition health critic Meara Conway said at a news conference in Saskatoon.
“So if you have a doctor in theory and you can’t see them in a timely way, it’s not meaningful.”
Conway said the Opposition is consulting with medical professionals in the province and will propose solutions for health care in a few months.
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