Phillips calls for action to address doctor shortage

By Al Beeber on September 29, 2021.

Herald photo by Al Beeber - MLA for Lethbridge West Shannon Phillips announces a four-point plan she wants Alberta Health Minister Jason Copping to implement in the next 30 days. Phillips spoke along with two Lethbridge women about the impact the loss of physicians is having on the city.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Lethbridge West MLA Shannon Phillips has released a four-point plan she wants new provincial health Minister Jason Copping to implement within 30 days to address the doctor shortage in Lethbridge and other healthcare problems in southern Alberta.
The NDP MLA and two women who have felt first-hand the loss of family physicians here spoke Tuesday to media at the Galt Museum & Archives.
Phillips wants the provincial government to develop a short-term targeted physician plan, a longer-term physician attraction plan geared toward smaller cities like Lethbridge; a plan to get health care workers into rural areas to get more people vaccinated; and she wants the province to provide more detailed local COVID updates.
Phillips said the recent announcement of the upcoming closure of Bigelow Fowler South clinic is going to have a serious impact on health care in the city. A large number of city residents already have lost their family physician and have been unsuccessful in finding another one, she said.
“The Bigelow Fowler clinic we learned last week is closing in November after 11 physicians gave their notice. Two labs are closed currently. The Campbell Clinic is one of several that aren’t accepting new patients and doesn’t have enough doctors to cover its current patient list.
“It’s not just an anecdotal crisis we’re hearing from our friends and neighbours,” the MLA said.
Phillips said just to get back to last year’s levels, the city needs 15 new physicians.
“Over the past year, Lethbridge has had the largest decline in physicians among major communities in Alberta,” Phillips said, adding the UCP has given numerous explanations including natural turnover as doctors retire or find new opportunities.
Phillips said it’s not normal to not be able replace lost family physicians “and that’s the piece the UCP has not recognized or done anything about. They have had the biggest hand in creating this situation where there is no-one to replace those family physicians for people like Savanna and Paige.”
The UCP has made “Alberta an undesirable place to live and work as a health care worker and now our families are the ones left paying the price for that,” she said.
Phillips told media Savanna Prociw and Paige Sauter are “like 10s of thousands in people in Lethbridge; they’ve lost their family doctor. They’re among the one third of people, in fact, who live in Lethbridge who no longer have a primary care physician,” said Phillips.
Sauter and Prociw echoed the MLA’s words with stories of their own experience here.
Prociw said she was lucky her husband’s doctor took her on as a patient after her own retired but clients she works with haven’t been so fortunate. She said the wait time in the emergency ward for simple things like prescriptions can be as long as six to eight hours, the use of ER for such common needs which adds to stress put on services provided there.
And while some rural doctors are taking on new patients, not all will accept them from Lethbridge, she added.
“I’m distraught people in our own community can’t access basic health care,” Prociw said.
She said the potential closure of a walk-in clinic “will completely slam the door shut for anybody looking to access basic health care in Lethbridge if you don’t have a family doctor.”
Sauter said she learned in April she was losing her physician and her clinic hasn’t been able to refer her to a new one and her family is left to wonder what is going to happen.
“My family and I have always had a family doctor we could rely on and in the past we’ve had our doctors leave and we’ve always been referred to another doctor to take their place and we’ve been taken on as new patients,” she said.
“We’re in a situation we’ve been told we need to find our own new physician and at this time it’s very hard to recruit doctors to Alberta.”
She said her clinic would do their best to provide a doctor until a new one is found but have learned their clinic is closing. And doctors in the area are saying they aren’t taking new patients.
Phillips said local surgeon Par Boora wrote online last week “this isn’t the regular ebb and flow of the family medicine workforce, it’s not what Grant Hunter called a micro situation when he dismissed concerns from people in Lethbridge in the news media,” said Phillips, calling the Taber-Warner MLA’s words “very very concerning and demonstrates that they don’t actually take the issues related to Lethbridge and those that affect us that seriously at all.”
Phillips said the medical system is in freefall.
“I need Minister Copping to develop a short-term targeted physician recruitment plan for Lethbridge” and have it operational in 30 days, she said.
She also said a longer term physician attraction program is needed that is tailored to small cities like Lethbridge “so we can take advantage of the upcoming federal funds that could hire nearly 900 doctors for Alberta and nearly 7,500 nationally,” she said.
“The UCP has created a toxic environment with doctors and they’re leaving, not coming,” she added.
Increasing vaccination rates in rural areas is also important and a plan is needed to get people in rural areas vaccinated.
“We can’t get out of this pandemic without getting people vaccinated,” she said.
She also said city residents “deserve better data about COVID-19 and what is going on in our communities.”
She said the city should know more about what’s going on with COVID in schools, proactively and in real time.
“We should get better than the occasional reporting of ICU patients in the South Zone,” Phillips said.
In 30 days, she wants Copping to “deliver daily and detailed local reporting on the status of COVID-19 here in Lethbridge and across the province in smaller centres.”

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