It began, not with a whisper, but a groan that echoed across my clinic and the community I serve.
Like a green, scheming miser, the Grinch of health care – festooned in a slew of government mismanagement and shortsighted policies – descended upon family medicine, stealing its spirit one policy at a time.
The Grinch didn’t just sneak into the stockings; he took the whole tree, leaving me and my colleagues scrambling for light in the darkness of a collapsing system.
“The problem is systemic,” I often tell anyone who will listen. It’s not rooted in the work ethic of physicians, but in a system designed to undermine us. It’s like plugging a leaky pipe with bubble gum. Sure, it’s colourful, but it’s not going to hold.
The Ontario government’s missteps are endless. Fee structures fail to reflect the complexity of modern family medicine, leaving me to choose between patient care and financial viability. Initiatives touted as solutions – like virtual care models – are implemented without adequate consultation, creating loopholes and inefficiencies. Why do we want purely virtual clinics without an actual family doctor to see, assess, examine, diagnose and counsel? Family Health Organizations (FHOs), once heralded as innovative, have become a tangled web of bureaucracy, limiting who can join and how close physicians are from one another, wrapping us in red tape tighter than a Christmas bow.
Oh, the red tape! It stacks and it spins, it tangles us up like a box full of pins. The forms and the filings, they never do stop, each twist and each turn makes our patience go pop!
I advocate for transformative change with many family physicians – compensation models, streamlined administrative processes, and a renewed emphasis on the value of family physicians. We are not widgets on an assembly line. We are the guardians of holistic, comprehensive and longitudinal care, and we deserve to be treated as such. Right now, we’re being treated like the lump of coal at the bottom of the stocking.
The Grinch’s presence isn’t just felt in our offices. It ripples through the community, where patients endure longer wait times and reduced access to care. Some argue that family doctors need to modernize, embracing team-based care and leveraging technology. I counter that these solutions are incomplete without addressing the core issue: chronic underfunding and undervaluation.
Team-based care is a noble goal, but oh, can’t you see? Without doctors to lead, it’s as empty as can be! It’s like a sleigh full of toys with no reindeer to pull, or a holiday feast with no plates to be full.
And then there are the voices of my patients. I hear them lament the loss of long-term relationships with their family doctors. “Dr. Smith was my doctor for 20 years and then he retired,” one patient told me. “Now I’m shuttled between walk-in clinics, explaining my history to someone new each time. It feels like every appointment starts with, ‘Who are you, and what’s your story?’” These stories underline the human cost of a system in disarray.
In the end, the Grinch’s greatest theft isn’t financial. It’s the erosion of trust – between patients and providers, between doctors and the government, and between Ontarians and their health care system. But unlike Dr. Seuss’s tale, this story’s resolution remains unwritten. My colleagues and I continue to advocate, urging policymakers to heed our warnings and embrace a vision of family medicine as a thriving, integral part of Ontario’s health care.
If we want to save family medicine, we must remember its heart: The joy and the care that set us apart. We’ll work and we’ll fight – we’ll keep it in play, and we won’t let the Grinch – or the system – steal it away!
