Virtual or in-person care? Post-pandemic, Canadian doctors say there’s room for both

The move to include telemedicine is being embraced by some physicians and patients who think it could become a permanent component of the healthcare system moving forward.

For 20 months, Canadians have dealt with an evolving medical landscape that has seen family doctors move from mostly in-person appointments to mainly virtual ones due to COVID-19 concerns.

Now, while some provinces are urging doctors to return to mainly in-person visits, some physicians and patients would rather embrace virtual care, saying the option is filling gaps in accessibility for Canadians struggling to find care.

“I didn’t need to leave my apartment. I didn’t need to travel anywhere,” said Sabrina Brathwaite, a 22-year-old Toronto resident. “I didn’t have to think ‘how am I going to Tetris this into my schedule?’”

Brathwaite — who got a new family doctor just a few weeks prior to the initial lockdown in March 2020 — has had a couple of virtual appointments from her own home. None of the appointments required a physical checkup and were all conducted via a phone call, which she said gave her peace of mind.

But, according to Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, the ministry of health, and the College of Physicians and Surgeons, the need for a “virtual care approach” has diminished. In an open letter to family doctors on Oct. 14, the health care groups describe a limit to what virtual care can provide, and that a “standard of care” is hard to match with in-person visits.

The province is not mandating virtual care is removed, but emphasizing that in-person care needs to be the way to move forward,

In different parts of the country, there are evolving stances on how doctors should proceed with primary care. Recently, the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Manitoba updated their virtual care policy to address the changes in primary care by using a “blended model of care balancing in-person and virtual medicine.”

But the message from B.C. is different. Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry wrote a letter to physicians on Sept. 3 that described the “drawbacks” to virtual care and encouraged doctors to opt for in-person visits, noting that they are safer to do given the high vaccination rates.