'We are facing a crisis in family medicine': College of family physicians warns of worsening crisis

“What we know is that we are facing a crisis in family medicine and we have been for some time.”

Dr. Mekalai Kumanan, the Cambridge doctor who serves as president of the Ontario College of Family Physicians, is reacting to the organization’s new report that says the situation is going from bad to worse.

“We knew that we had about 2.3 million people without a family physician in September 2022,” said Kumanan. “Our current forecasting for the province is suggesting that by 2026, we're going to see 4.4 million people without a family physician. That would mean that we'd have one-in-four Ontarians who don't have a family physician at that time.”

Locally, the situation is no better.

“For Kitchener-Waterloo in September 2022, the data shows that we had over 79,000 people who didn't have a family physician. And based on our forecasting, again by 2026, we're expecting that number to grow to over 150,000,” he explained

There many reasons why, but Kumanan said we are experiencing a perfect storm of a growing population, a large number of family doctors retiring, less medical students getting into family medicine, and new doctors not taking on as many patients.

According to Kumanan, part of the problem is the avalanche of non-medical work that comes with the job.

“Our data shows that family physicians spend over 19 hours per week dealing with administrative work. I think we can all say we don't want family physicians spending 19 hours sitting behind a computer. So we have to look at ways to free up that time.”

ATTRACTING NEW DOCTORS

Efforts are underway to attract more family physicians to the Region of Waterloo, with the Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce spearheading one local campaign.

“It's incredibly important when we are encouraging businesses to come and invest here, one of the first things they asked about is our healthcare system, hospitals, [and] family doctors,” said Ian McLean, the president and CEO of the Greater KW Chamber of Commerce.

This weekend the chamber is hosting their annual doctor recruitment event, bringing in over 30 family physicians and specialists.

“It used to be you're competing for family doctors, maybe provincially or across Canada,” McLean said. “Now we know that we're competing globally for these doctors.”

According to Kumanan, a strong primary healthcare system will save lives, and much needed resources.