Exasperated by the public health network in Quebec, a family doctor throws in the towel

“I was considered a lazy girl! ” The D^D Geneviève Côté speaks in the past tense. Because the 35-year-old family doctor is leaving the public health network. And not for the private sector. She works in federal prisons. The D^D Côté says he is fed up with the “lack of recognition” of the Legault government, which repeats that general practitioners are not doing enough.

The D^D Côté, who has set up an addiction clinic in Laval, is “going out of business”. It has already transferred 300 of its 500 patients registered at the access desk to a family doctor. She tries to give the other 200 – on methadone or suboxone treatment – to colleagues.

The general practitioner does not digest the words of Prime Minister François Legault towards her colleagues and herself. Quebec judges that the “acceptable threshold” of patients per doctor is 1000. However, 14% of family doctors have less than 500, revealed Tuesday The duty. The Prime Minister says he has in hand the list of doctors not taking care of enough patients.

“After months of work of unprecedented intensity on the part of family physicians to support a system on the verge of collapse, we are still being called lazy and responsible for all the ills of the system,” says the D^D Côté, former president of the Association of general practitioners of Laval (AMOL). It’s hurtful and for me, it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back. “

The D^D Côté claims to have worked 70 hours per week from the start of her practice in 2011 to her pregnancy in 2019. In addition to following 500 patients, the doctor practiced two days a week in federal prisons, which regularly took her to work. North Coast. Work invisible to the Quebec government. His compensation came from Ottawa and not from the Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec.

Looking back, the doctor believes she was working beyond her capabilities. “500 patients of a caseload regular, it’s okay, she says. But when all your patients are hypervulnerable, that’s another thing. “

The D^D Côté says she killed herself on the job to the point of having had black thoughts in January 2021. Granby hospital emergency physician Karine Dion had just taken her own life. “I was really not well. I felt so guilty, because I had my little one there, ”the doctor said, weeping, during a Zoom interview with The duty.

Exhausted, the D^D Côté says she was on “sick leave” last spring. “I was part-time,” she explains. Is it really a “work stoppage” then? “I didn’t dare stop completely,” she explains. I had no one to replace me. “

Help for medical mothers

The D^D Côté does not see himself having a second child under the same conditions as the first. Her maternity leave was not easy. She had to manage her clinic from the birth of her boy, in February 2020, until her return to the office, in June of the same year.

Finding a doctor to take care of her 500 patients in Laval was complicated, she says. A doctor from La Tuque that she had trained agreed to follow her clientele part-time in Laval. “But I had to take care of the refills of drugs, the results of analysis or blood tests that came in,” says Dr.^D Side. My secretary went on maternity leave too [pendant cette période]. “

The D^D Côté believes that the Federation of General Practitioners of Quebec (FMOQ) could do more to help young mothers. “I find that at the level of our union, there is inertia, in the sense that they say to themselves’ we have paid maternity leave faque motherhood is a settled case, ”she says. But so not. Beyond the money, what is hostile in this environment for a woman who is in her “family phase” is to leave and not to have a free head. To leave and to know that your patients, there isn’t someone looking after them. “

The D^D Côté made maternity leave one of her priorities when she was elected AMOL President in 2018 – she stepped down this year. She believes that a payday system should be put in place to replace family doctors who go on maternity leave. She says she told the FMOQ “several” times. “There are medical convenience stores in Quebec,” she said. But that’s just for the establishments. They cannot come and replace in the offices. “

Women doctors currently have to rely on their colleagues in FMGs “to cover their patients”, she explains. “You feel at ease in titi to go away, she points out. When you do this two or three times, you feel really comfortable. There are doctors who are told by their patients: “there, two children, that would have been enough”. “

The D^D Côté is not kind to the Quebec health system and the one who manages it, the Legault government. Lack of resources for the first line, difficult access to medical specialists, long wait times for patient examinations, feeling of isolation for general practitioners in office… “It is not improving, it is deteriorating. For me, it’s over. “

She now works 40 hours a week in federal penitentiaries. And it’s not about the money. She says she never charged her marginalized patients a dime to “fill out forms.” “At one point, I have the right as a person to make life choices and it’s not because I’m a doctor that that will change my values,” says D^D Side.

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