By Madeline Baker, Times Chronicle

The B.C. government appears to have made some headway in their attempts to draw new family doctors to the province with financial incentives, according to a statement released earlier this month.

The Ministry of Health announced in June that they would offer several incentives to recent graduates of family medicine through their new-to-practice contract program, including a $25,000 signing bonus, medical training debt forgiveness up to $130,000 over five years, and a $75,000 contribution to help with the overhead costs of their host clinic.

In the four months since that announcement, 140 doctors have expressed interest in their program with 54 contracts signed and 64 more in the works, according to the ministry’s most recent release.

This is the first good news to come out of the current healthcare crisis, which has reportedly left one in five BC residents without a family doctor and caused waves of temporary emergency room closures and dangerously long ambulance waits in small communities across the province.  

“It’s like a snowball rolling downhill,” said Oliver Mayor Martin Johansen about the crisis. “It’s getting more complex and it’s becoming a big issue here. We probably have a little more than 5000 people unattached [to a family doctor] here in the Oliver area right now.”

Johansen said that he has received phone calls from Oliver residents that are in dire need of healthcare services and no longer know where to turn. He has met with Minister of Health Adrian Dix twice to plead the community’s case and said that he believes civic governments are being heard, but the incentive program is only one of many steps that still need to be taken.

“We need to be opening and establishing primary care clinics across the whole regional district, because those incentives are targeting new graduates and they want to work with other teams of clinicians. So for us to be able to attract these new physicians that are being incentivized, we need to have a place for them to come and we do not have that here.”

He also agrees with Dix that the fee-for-service model by which doctors are paid is “a dinosaur” and needs to be reworked or replaced “so that they can take on complex patients and not see, like, 4050 patients in one day.”

Osoyoos Mayor Sue McKortoff said that she has high hopes for an overall improvement in primary care after the recent announcement, which comes on the heels of news that B.C. medical schools will increase the number of spaces in their family practice programs and that pharmacists have been given expanded roles in patient care.