Since May 2022, thanks to an agreement reached with the government, family doctors have put their hands together to improve accessibility to care. In 18 months, despite the serious shortage of staff (there is still a shortage of 1,500 family doctors in Quebec), we have managed to register a little more than a million patients in collective registration in connection with the establishment of reception desks. access to the first line (GAP), far exceeding the provincial objective, which was 500,000.
In Montreal, 260,000 appointment slots per year were offered in this context. In my small family medicine group (GMF) of nine doctors in Verdun, that’s 5,200 sessions per year. And thanks to a project I believe in: collective registration.
The reality is inescapable: we will never be able to follow all Quebecers in individual registration. There are not enough of us and, unfortunately, since the Barrette era and in the face of the denigration suffered by our profession, too few students wish to go into family medicine while retirements and departures are increasing. In addition, the multiple bureaucratic pitfalls and obligations of all kinds in GMF make our practice increasingly cumbersome and less attractive.
Despite everything, we took a step towards a new model of access to care, a model that made it possible to collectively register patients in groups of family doctors while working in teams with other health professionals. This model, that of the GAP, allowed triage through the 811 service so that patients could be directed to the right places and to the right professionals: a pharmacist, a physiotherapist, a dentist, an optometrist, towards nursing care in CLSC, a community organization, etc., or that they can have an appointment with a doctor quickly (in less than 36 hours) in their home clinic.
The rate of assigning appointments to patients with 811 in Montreal has been over 99% over the last two years. I hardly see how we can do better. All this to say that many patients have been able to benefit from this new model of access to care.
Against all expectations and common sense, the Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, recently decided, unilaterally, to put an end to this agreement. It makes no sense. This is one of the only measures that has given positive results in recent years in health! Not seeming to have measured the positive impact of this colossal work put in place over the last two years, the minister put an end to the agreement: budget cuts. We could have extended the agreement, improved it, moved towards another model of front-line care all together, but no, all of that was thrown in the trash.
Thousands of Quebecers risk soon seeing their access to care decline due to this bad government decision. Like thousands of doctors, despite my overload of work, I pitched in to help orphan patients who had not had a medical consultation sometimes for a long time, some elderly, sick, vulnerable, some who had just arrived. in the country, barely speaking French or English, others who only had a small ailment to sort out.
I know that many GAP patients were satisfied with the services offered, they told us so. We humbly improve things in their lives. And it is to them that I would like to give a voice. We cannot let this progress in the area of accessibility to primary care, as well as all the efforts invested over the past two years, come to nothing. The first line is the basis of any health system. Let’s protect her.