For decades, Louise Nichols and her husband were patients at the Group Health Centre in Sault Ste. Marie. Even when their doctor retired a few years ago, that didn’t change.
Nichols says she and her husband now have no choice but to use walk-in clinics that offer only virtual telemedicine appointments. Like so many others in the same situation, she has also endured waits of eight hours or more at Sault Area Hospital’s emergency department just to see a doctor. Bottom line: A growing list of local patients — many of them elderly — are suddenly without a doctor or nurse practitioner at the most vulnerable stage of their lives. Along with the stress of trying to find alternative care, many feel betrayed and abandoned, having wrongly assumed that the Group Health Centre would look after them for life.
Lorri Morrar was notified last fall that her GHC nurse practitioner would be leaving her practice in November 2022. She said she was notified in writing that GHC was “aggressively recruiting new nurse practitioners willing to practice at Group Health Centre.”“I feel like I’ve been kicked to the curb,” Morrar says. “I’ve been there for 40 years.”
— 36 physicians practicing full-time family medicine; 10 of them, or 28 per cent, are over the age of 58— nine locum physicians temporarily contracted to provide family medicine; seven of them, or 78 per cent, are over the age of 60The staffing challenges facing the Group Health Centre are no different than in other regions of the province, especially across northern Ontario.
“Without those nine PCPs, it is likely that a considerable number of patients will need to be de-rostered, as there will not be nearly enough PCPs available to care for a roster size of nearly 60,000 patients,” Zin says.The Northern Ontario School of Medicine has been a primary source of recruits for the Algoma District Medical Group. From 2018 to 2022, they lured 10 PCPs with ties to NOSM, eight of whom graduated from the NOSM Sault Ste. Marie Family Medicine Residency Stream.
Zin says some stop-gap measures have been put in place to keep as many patients as possible in the care of GHC and not de-rostered. Officials have been able to bring retired physicians and nurse practitioners back to work on temporary contracts as well as provide short-term contracts to locum physicians.
Health Health Latest News, Health Health Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: SooToday - 🏆 8. / 85 Read more »
Source: quintenews - 🏆 76. / 51 Read more »