Fourth doctor to leave Charlottetown within a month

Another family doctor has hung up their stethoscope on Prince Edward Island.

Doctor shortages continue to plague the region, and it may get worse before it gets better.

Charlottetown has lost four family doctors within a month.

The most recent sent a letter to patients late last week telling them his practice was closing and there wasn’t yet another doctor to take them on.

There just aren’t the family doctors to replace him.

“It’s not like they moved to other provinces to do family medicine. They’re leaving medicine, or they’re leaving family practice and doing another type of medicine,” said Dr. Michael Gardam, CEO of Health PEI.

“To me, that’s really a clear indication that family medicine as a specialty is in real trouble.”

All four of the doctors leaving Charlottetown were family physicians.

It’s not clear how many more might go, says Gardam.

“We have other doctors who are close to retirement, we hear that other doctors are not happy being family doctors,” said Gardam. “I think it’s reasonable to assume that this isn’t the end.”

He says the province is working on long-term solutions, changing the way family medicine is practiced on P.E.I., but that won’t be able to solve the problem in the short term.

In the meantime, it’s expected more people will be added to the province’s family doctor waitlist, which already has about 24,000 names.

That will have domino effects.

“A lot of these people don’t have anywhere else to go, so they are entering the emergency system, whereas it may not necessarily be an emergency, but they have no other place to go,” said Barbara Brookins, president of the P.E.I. Nurses Union.

“We don’t have enough walk-in clinics. We don’t have enough other alternate ways for them to access the health system.”

Brookins says that’s bad for patients and hard on all the other health-care team members who step up to cover these people’s care.

“Nobody really gets to know them well, because they’re going from one care provider to another,” said Brookins.

“And then when you’re coming into the urgent care system and having to be seen for something, that could be relatively minor, but with no other place to go. Then it impacts the wait times of everyone else.”

The more doctors who leave, the more strain is left on those who stay behind — causing more burnout.