B.C. family, emergency doctors call for action on specialist waitlists

Family and emergency doctors are speaking up about the impacts of wait times for specialist physicians.

Family and emergency room doctors are speaking up about the impacts of wait times for specialist physicians on their patients and the health-care system as a whole.

Patients seeing general practitioners and showing up at emergency departments are sicker, increasingly desperate and suffering. With 1.2 million people on a waitlist for specialist care in the province, that works out to almost one in four British Columbians waiting for answers and treatment.

Dr. Maryam Zeineddin, the president of BC Family Doctors, told CTV News on Tuesday that crucial follow-ups are not getting done as soon as they should.

“We did all the preliminary work up for a patient of mine, we found a disastrous finding on one of her imagings. To urgently actually see a specialist now, our wait times are more than a month. Ideally ‘urgent’ should be within two weeks, max,”

The consultant specialists of B.C. raised the alarm on long waitlists last week and now support is pouring in from their peers in cancer care and in emergency rooms who are faced with many of those same patients.

“They simply turn to our emergency departments out of desperation, as a place of last resort,” noted Dr. Ben Tuyp, co-president of the BC Society of Emergency Medicine. “This is frustrating and distressing for them, and it’s not sustainable and it’s ultimately not in the best interests of patient care.”

That then has a knock-on effect for the system.

“We’re experiencing unprecedented levels of overcrowding,” said Tuyp. “This is leading to very high wait times. It’s not uncommon that I might start a shift first thing in the morning, and patients will have been waiting more than 12 hours to see an emergency physician.”

The health minister says recruitment efforts are ongoing – pointing to the hiring of 138 new oncologists in the past two years.

“It’s incredibly frustrating for people to have to wait for this kind of care. In a time of a global health-care worker shortage, we know there’s so much to do to attract physicians to our province and to be able to retain those physicians,” Josie Osborne told CTV News in a Tuesday interview.

As for potential solutions, doctors CTV spoke with say it’s not just about the number of specialists – but also how the system is run. They’ve been advocating for years to have a centralized referral system to connect patients with specialists sooner.