Some people on the waiting list for a family doctor in Nova Scotia might be missing out on their chance to connect.
Automated phone calls from the Nova Scotia Health Authority may be going unanswered or going straight to voicemail, mistaken for nuisance calls.
Chloe Kennedy has been on the Nova Scotia physician waitlist for eight months and she's been without a family doctor for eight years. She hadn't heard from the health authority until last week, when she got a strange call.
“You don't know when you see a line of zeros across your cellphone screen who it's going to be, and then when I heard them saying, 'This is the Nova Scotia Health Authority,' and the robo-voice, it was a little confusing,” says Kennedy.
The call display showed a series of zeros, and instead of a person, an automated voice asked Kennedy to press a button to confirm she still needed a doctor.
“I thought immediately that I was getting a family doctor. That it would be, press this button to speak to your new physician. So I got very excited,” she says.
Instead, the call was just to keep the patient waitlist current. The automated calls ask the patient to confirm if they still need a doctor, but there's no chance to input any other information or speak to someone. So, if the patient has moved, but they still have the same phone number, they might get matched with a doctor in Digby, even though they may now live in Dartmouth.
That's assuming they answer the phone at all, with no caller ID showing.
In a release, the Nova Scotia Health Authority says, "People change phone numbers and move, and as a result, the contact information in the registry is no longer current. We want to ensure that we can reach people when there is a practice that is able to accept them."
But Kevin Chapman of Doctors Nova Scotia says the calls should aim to do more than get current phone numbers.
"For the physician, who is it that I'm potentially going to see? What are their needs? The kinds of things that really help a physician’s patient relationship and establish that relationship, which is tough to do in a very impersonal administrative sort of process,” says Chapman.
Chapman says the patient matching system still has some kinks to work out. In some cases, doctors are getting matched with patients living two hours away.
“It's just refining it a little bit more so that if you're in Cheticamp, you're really getting patients from that sort of area who, in the middle of winter, aren't driving from Inverness,” says Chapman.
Doctors Nova Scotia says it would be happy to work with the health authority to revise the procedures, starting with a real person making phone calls.
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Emily Baron Cadloff.
