A clinic is being established for patients without a family physician as a temporary way to deal with the large number of medical orphans in Powell River, but a longer term solution could be with nurse practitioners.
Doctors at The Medical Clinic Associates are offering the service after a number of doctors recently left their practices.
Medical clinic doctors are advising all patients without a family physician to continue searching for a regular family doctor. When a new family physician is recruited for Powell River, this clinic will stop. Prescriptions for narcotics and other addictive medication will not be prescribed due to the inability to provide continuity of care. The temporary clinics will not have set hours and patients will have to phone ahead to find out when doctors will be available.
Sandy McCartie is a self-employed social worker, counsellor and chair of Powell River Women’s Health Network, a grassroots women’s health organization. She said a number of people have attended health network meetings and wondered about the role nurse practitioners could play in the doctor shortage.
“It’s one way to alleviate some of the garden variety things, like colds and flu that people need a physician for,” she said. “The only option for people is the emergency room. If you have children or anyone in the family with a chronic health condition, just to get a prescription refilled, you’re going to have to sit there and wait. If you’ve got a sick child, that’s really hard.”
McCartie said she’s interested in looking at how to promote having more nurse practitioners in the community in the future.
She’s not alone. Nurse practitioners are identified in a Legislative Library of BC report from May 2008 called Physician Supply and Demand, as “a way to ease the pressure of physician shortages and reduce health care costs, by expanding the role of nurse to include diagnosis, prescription and treatment, through extra training and certification.”
“The main thing to remember about nurse practitioners is that we don’t want to be alternatives to doctors,” said Sara Mitchell Banks, a nurse practitioner trained at the University of BC. “We want to work collaboratively with doctors. We’re able to assess, diagnose and treat acute and chronic problems.”
Nurse practitioners are trained to treat patients in a variety of settings including acute care, residential care, mental health and community practice.
According to the report on doctor supply, the establishment of legislation and formalized training in BC has been slow to develop. The first class of nurse practitioners graduated in 2005. In Ontario there were 653 licensed nurse practitioners that year.
The provincial government announced last May the NP4BC initiative which included $22.2 million for 190 positions for already trained nurse practitioners.
