Halifax family clinic welcoming new patients gets flooded with phone calls

Health clinic ad starts phone-calling frenzy A phone-calling frenzy has illustrated the high demand for family doctors in Nova Scotia. Heidi Petracek reports.

Thousands of Nova Scotians are on a waiting list, so when a Halifax clinic announced it was taking new patients from outside the list -- the phones starting buzzing.

The clinic didn’t anticipate somebody posting the announcement on social media.

“I think we had thousands of phone calls,” family physician Dr. Laniyi Ogunsanya. “We couldn’t do anything else.”

Ogunsanyasays there were so many calls, the clinic's patients couldn't get through.

“Four old ladies who've been with us for many years, they had to come walk down here you know, which is, well, which is understandable,” he said.

The sign is gone now, but it was meant to let patients at the clinic know there are now two new doctors here -- fresh from the U.K.

Ogunsanya is one of them -- the result of recruitment efforts by the province.

“I can see what the Nova Scotia Health Authority, the Doctors Nova Scotia, and the College Of Physicians And Surgeons were saying to us, that there's high demand here, I've tasted a little bit of it,” said Ogunsanya.

But there are still thousands of Nova Scotians who need a family doctor.

More than 58,000 on the provincial waitlist in October became more than 59,000 as of Nov. 1, a two per cent increase.

The latest numbers show 6.4 per cent of people in the province don't have a regular physician.

The Nova Scotia Health Authority says clinics like can accept new patients in different ways, but it does recommend using the provincial waitlist. The authority has reached out to this clinic and has offered names from that waitlist, which the clinic says it will be working from, from now on.

The head of Doctors Nova Scotia says attracting new doctors to come to the province will help cut down the waitlist, but there’s still a long way to go.

“We also have to remember we have to retain them as well,” said Dr. Tim Holland. “So, as long as we keep our eyes on the prize, I'm optimistic we might be able to start seeing some impact over the next year.”

Back at the family clinic, there's a new sign on the wall now.

Dr. Ogunsanya  says he's working through the provincial registry and hoping to service about 1,500 patients all told.

A drop in the bucket compared with the thousands still waiting.

As of Nov. 1, 36,595 Nova Scotians had managed to get a family doctor through the provincial waitlist, a registry which has been around for two years now.

What's not clear is how many other Nova Scotians have simply found their own physicians by taking matters into their own hands.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Heidi Petracek.