AUDIO – A local doctors’ association is making strides to improve primary health care delivery in Powell River. Guy Chartier is coordinator of the Powell River Division of Family Practice, a grassroots doctors’ group established almost three years ago. It is one of 33 currently in operation in British Columbia.
The group, first established in 2010, was called the Georgia Straight Division of Family Practice and included doctors from Sechelt and Gibsons, but later reformed specifically for Powell River physicians.
The division currently includes 25 general practitioners and approximately 10 specialists, making it one of the smallest in the province.
Divisions of Family Practice, an initiative of the General Practice Services Committee(GPSC), is designed to give family doctors more influence on delivery of local primary health care, improve patient care and provide professional satisfaction for physicians. It was created through a partnership between the provincial government and BC Medical Association.
“The first few years were about establishing our roots,” said Chartier, who has coordinated the organization since May. “We’re a young organization and now we’re growing.”
Powell River Division of Family Practice has up until now operated out of the coordinator’s home, but now the group is opening what Chartier calls “a division hub,” which is more than simply office space, he explained.
“It’s a very different approach to the space,” he said. “This place gives us a platform to engage people, not just a place to put staff at a desk.”
The hub is located at #105-4675 Marine Avenue, in the same building as Powell River Regional District office and Powell River Association for Community Living.
Chartier explained that the hub space was designed with an open concept to allow visitors a chance to see the division’s brainstorming wall on current issues and list of projects.
It has a reception area, an open meeting room and office space for the division coordinator and the health resource navigator. Joanne Murray was recently hired as the division’s health resource navigator to help family doctors connect their patients with community resources.
One of the realities for family doctors is that they are often isolated within their own practice, he added.
“Just by having this open floor, you have this sense of possibility,” he added. “It’s all about putting brains together and getting people working together.”
One of the division’s current projects is addressing is the shortage of family physicians in Powell River. Patients receive better care when doctors know them, their personal histories and are able to follow up, Chartier said. “It’s really been shown to be the best model for health care,” he said.
The BC government estimates that there are close to 100,000 British Columbians unattached. There is not any local data on numbers of unattached patients currently available.
“No one has that specific number of who is actually unattached to a family physician in Powell River,” said Chartier. “It is extremely difficult to quantify and at this point we are still working on it.”
He said it is a complicated number to determine. The division is putting a lot of its resources into finding it out, because “we feel it’s really important to nail this number down to address our strategy and what we’re going to do at the community level.”
Chartier is tallying the numbers of patients attached to each family doctor in town by accessing each doctor’s electronic medical records database. “It’s all confidential and we’re not looking at names or medical issues—just numbers,” he said. Then he will compare that number to census data for the region.
“When we did a first draft run a few weeks ago we ended up with a number higher than our current population,” he said.
According to the most recent census there are 20,538 people living in Powell River Regional District, he said. “If you don’t apply any filters to the data, the number is going to be really inaccurate,” he added.
Chartier is working to filter out people who may have at one point been attached to a doctor in Powell River but no longer live here, deceased people still in the system and people who may have seen more than one family doctor.
“By adding those filters you can have a more accurate number,” he said. “But it still won’t be a perfect number and it will always be time sensitive.”
Chartier expects that he will be able to provide that number in a few weeks.
“The big question is, is there a physician shortage,” he said. “The answer is yes, but how big is it?”
The ministry of health has tried to address this problem by increasing the numbers of medical school seats as well as launching a $133-million “A GP For Me” program earlier in the year which aims to find a family doctor for every British Columbian through recruiting more doctors, reducing workloads and creating more clinics. On the local level the division has set up a doctor recruitment committee looking for locum doctors who are able to cover doctors temporarily while they are on leave and also doctors who wish to open a practice here.
Once the current number of unattached patients in Powell River is known, solving the problem will not be as simple as recruiting a certain number doctors to match the need.
Family physicians do not all have the same number of patients in their practices. Factors like the level of patient’s need and doctor’s capacity help determine the number. Chartier said that although there are 25 family doctors in Powell River, there are only 17.5 full-time equivalent doctors. Some doctors have as few as 500 patients and others as high as 1,000 on average. Part-time physicians may also have a smaller practice, he said.
“You have the complexity of getting the information, but also the complexity within our community,” said Chartier, who noted that Powell River’s aging population and number of families living in poverty puts additional strain on the medical system.
Powell River residents currently without family doctors have the option of going to see a doctor at the emergency room in Powell River General Hospital, seeing the nurse practitioner, Carol Smith, during her weekly clinic also at the hospital or going to the walk-in clinic for unattached patients Monday to Thursday from 2 to 4:30 pm at the Marine Medical Building, 4537 Marine Avenue.
AUDIO – Listen here to Guy Chartier speak about making strides to improve primary health care delivery in Powell River.
