Physician, Heal Thyself

And do it before winter...

Winter approaches. Even though I have lived in Ottawa, and Hamilton, I feel it more this year than I did in those cities. It’s something about the never-ending gusts of wind, and the waves in the Atlantic, that makes me feel that this will be a real winter.

And I like that feeling, even though a hundred year old house is also a poorly insulated and single glazed house, and even though our first oil-tank top-up next week will likely hit us for something like $1700. Snow-tires went on this week, and we wait.

Meanwhile my prescriptions have run out. This was my first experience with Nova Scotia health-care, and dear god I hope I don’t get seriously sick.

Our local hospital has an Emergency room that’s open roughly four hours, most days. Although Nova Scotia is very quick to issue you a Health Card, they also immediately direct you to go to the Need a Family Practice Registry, a provincial list for people without a family doctor or nurse practitioner.

Depending on which media outlet you believe, we’re roughly number 120,000 on that list.

That’s when your friendly Nova Scotia government shunts you off to get virtual care. A Zoom meeting with a doctor, something that works superbly in France. When you log onto Qare you’re offered a long list of doctors who have openings that day. You can look at their specialities and choose one easily.

In Nova Scotia you begin logging in to the Maple site at about 5 minutes before 9 am, and by about five minutes after 9 am are faced with a statement that there are no more appointments available for that day. This is despite their claim that you can:

See a doctor online in Nova Scotia today and skip the walk-in clinic

Don’t waste time at the walk-in clinic — all of our online doctors in Nova Scotia are accepting consultations for new patients. Connect with doctors online in Nova Scotia, 24/7.

That’s kind of a bare-faced lie. It turns out that those 100,000+ Nova Scotians lacking a doctor have access, according to Global News, to a total of:

…67 health professionals — physicians and nurse practitioners — who provide virtual consultations on top of existing general practice commitments. Brendan Elliot, a spokesman for Nova Scotia Health, said in an email that there are between 150 and 200 virtual visits available on a typical weekday, available to the 120,400 people in the province without a family doctor.

Thus begins an hour on the phone calling every clinic and even private clinics within an ever-expanding circle to find someone, anyone, who can write a prescription. I did find someone about 45 minutes away from Liverpool, and was successful, but wow, this is not what I expected from Canadian health care.

All of this was capped off by a Globe and Mail article about the hundreds of Canadian medical students who are forced to study in Ireland or Jamaica because there aren’t enough spaces here, and who can’t get a hospital residency in their own country of birth because this makes them “foreign” doctors.

Needless to say, all of this was done intentionally at a time when it was decided that we needed to reduce health-care spending. Now, decades later, we have a mess that looks nearly impossible to fix.