10 minutes: this is the time allocated to the doctor you see in a walk-in clinic. 10 minutes later, he will have to meet another patient, then another, then another, then another… up to a possible total of 40 patients without an appointment during the day. If he takes five more minutes with you, then another five minutes with the next patient, etc., he will have accumulated more than three hours of delay at the end of the day. You had an appointment at 7 p.m., well you won’t see the doctor until 10 p.m. or maybe not at all because the Family Medicine Group (GMF) will not be open until midnight…
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
During this 10 minutes, the doctor (the vast majority of them are women) will have to skim through your file to find out who you are and what your health history is. Can you sum it up in two minutes? Not sure… Then you will explain the reason(s) for your visit. Let’s say you have a bad knee, or an ingrown toenail, but you also mention another problem, such as stomach pain.
But is it really in the stomach or more generally “in that corner” that your pain is located? Tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock. How many minutes have you been in the exam room? Six minutes? The doctor has four minutes left to decide which health problem is more important, your knee or your stomach. What if the pain in the stomach or in that area was a symptom of a more serious problem? An ulcer, cancer or something else?
There are barely two or three minutes left for the doctor to examine you, assess the situation, prescribe blood tests, an ultrasound or any other examination and prescribe the appropriate medication if necessary.
Not to mention that she should note all of this in your file so that the next doctor you see can find out about the situation. Because it will probably be another doctor, not the same one. What about your knee or your ingrown toenail? Too bad, you’ll have to come back another time…
Do you think it’s to multiply appointments and fill their pockets that the doctor acts like this? That by multiplying the appointments, she multiplies her income? Yes, it’s true that Quebec doctors are paid on a fee-for-service basis and that $40 (a little less in fact) for 10 minutes of work is a good hourly rate, but don’t forget that when she receives the results of your analyzes or other examinations, the doctor will have to go back to your file, reread her notes (which she will have completed the evening or the next day because in two minutes, it is just not possible), read the results that happened, draw conclusions and make the necessary decisions, such as having you come back for another consultation, referring you to a specialist doctor, ordering other examinations, etc.
Would the solution to this situation be to allow more than 10 minutes for walk-in consultations? Maybe, but if the length of each appointment increases to 20 minutes, how long will you have to wait to see a doctor?
Of course, the real solution would be for each patient to have a family doctor and to have access to this doctor quickly, but for that, it might be necessary for everyone to start by showing up for their treatment appointment and there are no more than 100,000 no shows (and possibly many more), as we learned this week. In the meantime, please stop blaming family doctors for the flaws in our system.