Anyone in Prince George who wants a doctor can get one, according to a report from the Prince George Division of Family Practice.
The organization, made up of area family physicians, has determined 80,000 residents in the region are now attached to a family physician and about 9,000 people are not looking for a family doctor.
"What we've learned is that this isn't something you can solve with an initiative or program," said Dr. Garry Knoll, president of the group's board of directors. "It really has to have a lot of partners in it and everybody that has a stake in it needs to come to the table and help with the issue."
Northern Health, the northern medical program, and residency program in family medicine are important players that were on board to achieve the results.
The report emphasizes that recruitment of health professionals needs to be continuous.
"We've had help from city council and help from business leaders in our community so we can not only recruit the doctor but the doctor's family," said Knoll. "These are the things that have taken quite a bit of time."
A prototype presented by the government of B.C. and doctors of B.C. in 2010 called A GP for Me was developed and Prince George was one of three B.C. communities to take up the challenge. The program was designed for residents looking for a family doctor to find one.
"We've worked hard to make Prince George, in the eyes of recruits, a good place to live professionally and a good place to live as a family and as a part of a community," said Knoll.
Now Prince George is in a place where its considered a success.
One of the keys was to track the doctor-patient data, focusing on counting how many current patients a doctor has.
"So physicians will go through their files and say 'yes, that's an active patient, we've seen that person in the last three years, no, that patient passed away, or no, that patient moved away,'" said Knoll. "So we think our data is pretty robust and reliable."
People without a doctor can still go to the Blue Pine Primary Health Care Clinic, which opened in 2012 at 102-1302 Seventh Avenue.
"That is a triage centre for people who show up and can't find a doctor," said Knoll, who said even if there's a full roster of patients, doctors will still take on a patient with complex health care issues.
"Doctors feel compassionate towards them and take them on," said Knoll. "So we all take on new patients from out of town. The BC Cancer Agency will call up and say 'there's a cancer patient moving to Prince George to be with family, can you take another patient' and, of course, family doctors do that all the time and it's a bit more of an informal thing."
It only takes one doctor to get sick or die and suddenly there are as many as 1,500 patients without a doctor. Other doctors can step in temporarily but recruitment and retention efforts have to be continuous to avoid shortages.
"We want to have a whole multifaceted plan that gets away from the swings in availability that some communities have struggled with and is really hard."
There are upwards of 9,000 people not actively looking for a doctor in Prince George, but "these are people who identify themselves as not having any health needs, Knoll explained, giving a 21-year-old non-smoking male university student from elsewhere as an example.
"There's also a small number of people who may be living in addiction or struggling with major mental health issues that fall through the cracks and haven't been identified in the community," said Knoll.
The whole goal for the Prince George Division of Family Practice is to increase capacity, not only for attaching patients to physicians but to improve the quality of care.
"We're going down a path with Northern Health to improve team-based care for people who have multiple complex medical issues," said Knoll. "We want to really change that game. We want less people in hospital, less people who are institutionalized, and who are better cared for in the community."
