Family doctors say they are encouraged by commitments in B.C.’s speech from the throne to attach more British Columbians to primary care, but say the province needs to speed up the work.
In Tuesday’s speech, the NDP government pointed to efforts to recruit and retain more doctors, while allowing doctors to spend more time with their patients.
Dr. Ana Boskovic, a family doctor and board member with the B.C. College of Family Physicians said the province has work to do.
“We strongly, strongly feel that access to a family doctor should be the standard for British Columbians,” she told Global News.
“The research shows that when a British Columbian is attached to a family doctor they have better health outcomes — meaning less emergency room visits, earlier detection and diagnoses of diseases and better management of chronic conditions.”
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The B.C. government revamped its pay model for family doctors in 2023, which the province said, as of September, had attracted 835 physicians to practice and resulted in about a quarter-million people being connected to primary care.
As of October, 2024, B.C. Family Doctors said the number of British Columbians without a family physician had fallen from 1 million to about 700,000.
Boskovic said the new pay structure has helped, but that like everyone else doctors are struggling with the rising cost of doing business — including more expensive leases, equipment and staff salaries.
At the same time, she said they continue to waste time that could be spent with patients dealing with administrative work including signing sick notes and filling out disability, tax credit and insurance forms.
“I have at least a couple of visits being taken in a day to provide someone with a sick note,” she said.
“As a family physician, about 20 to 30 per cent of my time is spent doing paperwork and administrative tasks.”
The college is urging the province to move quickly on its pledge to cut red tape for doctors.
Health Minister Josie Osborne said the province aims to have updates for doctors in the “near future.”
“We will be moving forward on reducing administrative burden for primary care providers, for doctors,” she said.
“We made the commitment during the election around sick notes, and the work right now, looking at the options available for how to accomplish that is being done.”
Along with scrapping sick notes, Boskovic said doctors want to see complex medical forms standardized, which would allow support staff to handle more of their paperwork.
