I wasn't thinking about just having more patients than one should which would usually just mean longer wait times for apointments. By doubling up I meant literally seeing two patients in one appointment slot. Or when all the slots are taken but the secretary - being the darling she is - will somehow fit you in.

It's great that this means you can usually get seen within a day, but it does mean that appointments start running behind and you feel pressured to finish your turn with the doc.

I think it can make a considerable difference when it comes to treatment outside of the hospital.

When we moved here from Quebec (and pre-existing conditions prevented us getting prescription coverage) my wife and stepson had ongoing prescription drugs that cost about $30 or $40 a month in Quebec. Here it was $170.

Luckily we had a bit of capital to call on but then my wife developed other conditions and we were faced with costs of around $450 a month just for her.

Our income was low enough for every other province to have applied a maximum to costs of between $50 and $100 a month but this province's program required one to be virtually skint and we still had a bit of capital.

So that was $350-$400 a month extra to find because of the differences in how the provinces run health care.

It just strikes me as odd that such inequality exists in something so basic as prescriptions according to where you live. It really is the difference in being able to afford it or not.

I don't know how doctors schedule exactly but they appear to be 10 mins apart, mine today is 10am and my wife is at 10:10 same doctor, but yes the doctor is never on time, 10am really probably means closer to 10:30 before I get called by the nurse.


Prescriptions are a worry we have with leaving BC, BC is pretty generous and covers nearly all our medications and I know some provinces would not be as generous. Once in a blue moon there will be something not covered.

My wife's medication has no generic, and runs about 300 per month if we had no provincial coverage. (4.79 per pill 2 pills per day)

Mine has a generic so overall pretty cheap at 39 cents a pill and 22 cents per pill. (the 22 cent one is also available OTC, but costs more OTC.

Our very own family GP (same age as we are) that we have had from the mid 70's, runs a full blown medical clinic that you get everything in one stop shop that is open 7 days a week excluding stat holidays..

Waiting to get into his office for him personally (as one of the dozens on site) I can say its never less than a 30 minute wait for a scheduled time appointment any time after 8am. I have waited over one hour & over the years have 'stop watched' the average per patient time he spends on each one. He spends an average of 6 minutes per patient.

His own personal practice days seeing patients, are Monday to Friday

His seeing patient hours

- Monday: 6:30am - 8pm
- Tuesday: - Thursday 6:30am - 5pm
- Friday: 6:30am - 3pm

I know he does hospital visits prior to starting in the morning because he has told me this, as well as he visited my daughter at 6am when she was in hospital & goodness knows if he also does after office hours visits or related billing work.

Now after all of this, If ts not urgent, I will book & try to get a first appointment to see him between 6:30am to 7am, this way the wait time is shorter. Should I try & be successful in getting an appointment with another doctor in his facility because its a 3-4 day wait to get in to see my very own GP, I have seen from my own personal experience & that of my wife that he is well & truly pissed that some other doctor is taking his patient.... I wonder why?

Only took an hour, but the doctor was 26 mins late as she got held up in the ER, she was on ER duty overnight, so its not her fault she was late.

Of course its her fault, are you thinking or believing that you are to blame for your appointment in seeing the doctor?

Not to worry because everyone waited, so she never lost a penny of her billing

Doctors do not rank very high on the scale of service level in my books, after all, knowing the snotty nosed kid from next door that I went to school with that is now a GP who thinks that he walks on water, really gets my goat, as do the kids on the other side, one who is a motor mechanic & the other on lifetime welfare benefits.

There is no winning the human race battle. Its a service industry world & I'm pleased that I have choices to pick & choose who I get service from including my tardy GP which I haven't seen in 2-years

It's not really anyone's fault when an emergency arises and a doctor is delayed because of it. You can't plan for emergencies.


I am not going to fault a doctor for having to deal with an emergency.

We have very down to earth hippy like doctors in this town, none of any attitude that I have met and are incredibly nice and good bed side manner, they just have too many patients overall, and a good amount of them also cover the walk in clinic and ER at some point in the week.

This town doesn't doesn't attract the arrogant type of doctors that exist.

Let's look at the lack of doctors from another angle ............ that of producing doctors.

In 2010 and again in 2013 (election years!), the BC Government announced a new programme called the GP for Me campaign.

They promised that every BC citizen who wanted a family doctor would have one by the end of 2015.

Well, they have just announced that they will not be meeting that promise ........... in fact the waiting list of people without family doctors has increased from 176,000 to over 200,000, although the population has also increased by over 200,000

Anyone involved with a university or knowing anything about the training of doctors, laughed in disbelief when the promises were made.

First, there were not enough places at a BC university to train sufficient medical students to graduation in the time

Second,there were not enough places in Family Practice Resident programmes

Third, many existing doctors were approaching retirement age as they had begun practise in the 1960s and 1970s

so, fulfilling the promise meant producing enough trained Family Doctors to both replace retirees and increase the numbers.

That required that the universities and residency programmes needed more funding to provide the classroom and lab spaces, and staff, needed for training. The government did not then give enough money to provide as many places as needed, of course!

There have been advances made .......... the opening of the Medical School at the University of Northern British Columbia, associated with the UBC programme, an increase in the number of seats in existing programmes, increase in the number of places for Family Practice residents, encouraging immigration of trained doctors, etc. And also the development of more integrated health team clinics.

I know that at the Family Practice Clinic at UBC, and I think also at the one run from St Paul's Hospital, that the majority of each year's intake are required to promise that they will work in rural areas for (I think) 5 years ..... and they are actually often sponsored by a rural organization, eg Northern Health, that requires the doctor to work for the authority for 2 years post-residency. They also have to serve a portion of their residency in the ER, so that they will be able to staff ER in small towns.

I've been treated by residents at the Clinic who then moved to Powell River, Terrace, and other places after completion of their programme. The first two were especially good doctors, as well ........... only much too far for me to travel!! The communities who got them really won.


this is the link to the article in today's Vancouver Sun .......

B.C. family doctor shortage worsening, despite campaign promise

JS said in responding to something that I posted...........



The annual test 30 years ago consisted of blood work, and physical examination, for adults and children. Plus my doctor also did an annual Pap smear for women until about 1973, then it changed to every 2 years. This was of course not that long after that test had been devised, and they were still trying to find out how often it should be done ............ but what I've said applied to every woman over the age of 21 or 25.

The PSA test is covered if your doctor ticks the box that says there is a reason for the test to be carried out .............. that doctor believed that men should be tested regularly. My OH had it every year, even after we moved to the Clinic, until 2005 ........... when he had one operation that led to a problem that meant his prostate had to be reamed out (literally!). Now, they do the test about every 2 or 3 years.

well now ............ yes, I do happen to think that an annual exam consisting of blood work, bp, and physical exam is GOOD health care ............... and it is what I pay for in the monthly premiums I pay to the provincial MSP programme, but they in their bureaucratic wisdom have decided that such exams are not necessary. Change from one to the next is noted .......... and the patient warned if necessary

It seems that I am assumed to be able to tell if I am developing diabetes, or a liver problem, or kidney problem, or lung problem.

.......... so instead of having the security of a simple annual exam, the patient goes more often to the doctor because of "feeling funny"


Why did you assume that invasive unnecessary tests were done???????



Every good doctor that I have had, and I have had several over the last 10 years who are being trained this way, has done bp every time I go, and I still have blood tests done every year ........... admittedly, I now have high bp that needs checking, and I take a couple of medications that COULD affect liver function.

MSP pays doctors according to a schedule ............. 10 minutes is the "standard" visit time. The doctor does not get paid if he spends longer than 10 minutes with you.

That's why some doctors are apparently insisting that you discuss only 1 topic per visit ............ hard lines if you have 2 problems you wanted to discuss!!

Nor does it allow much time for the doctor to really talk to you if he wants to find out more about you and your health / state of mind. etc


The payment schedule has been set by bureaucrats in Victoria ........ and has set times and payments for differing appointments


I never worry if I have to wait for a doctor ............. it probably mans that he is spending longer than the 10 minute allotted time listening to someone, and I may want him to spend more than 10 minutes with me!



You are lucky that BC is covering your medications .......... they've given us such a high deductible limit that we would not reach it until about October each year!!

Luckily, we can pay for Extended Health Insurance which begins to kick in when we've spent $1,000. My average drug costs per month are between $300 and $400.

Medical coverage varies enormously across the country, to the extent that people visiting another province are often advised to take out Travel Insurance, just as we would if we went down to the US or to Europe, Australia, etc

That advice is getting stronger here in BC ........... as it becomes more apparent that the BC MSP programme may well only pay a portion of medical costs incurred in another province.

We looked into Travel Insurance before Christmas when we were intending to travel across Canada by train (both ways) to NS, a trip that would mean being out of BC for 3 weeks.

The cost of the insurance was waaaaaaaay more than we would pay for the same equivalent time spent in the US


I don;t think the provinces get equal amounts from the Feds, but alos, how they spend it is upto the individual province

Farewell scilly. May the fifth be with you.

There was a Supreme Court ruling in 2005 related to Québec where they basically said that if a province fails to provide an adequate standard of care, then you could technically go private. But as a practical matter it's almost impossible to prove and no-one is going to set up shop on that basis.

In Alberta it is technically legal for a GP to be in private practice, but if they do, they cannot charge anything to AHCIP, so that makes it economically impossible because they either have to be 100% private or 100% on AHCIP, which is stupid imo.

As far as I'm aware, only NL has a mixed system similar to the UK, which is just a practical reality given the small population, they can't do it any other way.

What the Wildrose has proposed is if there is any sort of procedure required that is typical, e.g. a hip replacement, and the waiting list is longer than x amount of time (depending on procedure), that AHCIP would compensate the person up to the same amount if they go abroad for treatment.

Which seems like a totally sensible suggestion to me, but then you get into all the bleating nonsense about a "two-tier" healthcare system. Well who loses in that scenario? It costs AHCIP exactly the same amount, and it reduces the waiting list, so everyone benefits, whether they can afford to go abroad or not.

It makes me cringe every time I hear this "two-tier" expression. Even the provinces send people abroad in critical situations. A few years ago it wasn't uncommon for ICU patients to be flown down to Great Falls.

"Two-tier healthcare system" = dogmatic socialist nonsense. Hello, practical realities.

Patients seem to praise the doctors who order the most tests and dismiss the ones who make an accurate diagnosis from a through clinical examination and then order fewer exams.
I've heard tests described as placebos and it giving the patient faith in their care. Still, as a venerable old doctor once told me, patients are happier to die in the care of bad doctor that they have faith in than be cured by one they dislike.

The implementation of both the NHS and Healthcare in Saskatchewan was opposed by the physicians. In Saskatchewan the physicians went on strike, in Britain Bevan "stuffed their mouths with gold".

I think one of the major differences in Canada that is hardly ever mentioned is that Canadian doctors and nurses can work in the US quite easily, they have to get their qualifications recognized but it's pretty easy for them to enter the US on TN-1.

I remember talking to a consultant who had 14 TN-1s because he consulted at 14 different US hospitals! I remember also I had a doctor when I lived in the US who was a Canadian on TN-1 as well.

So you have to play somewhat nice with them if you're the Canadian govt. because your healthcare staff can quite easily bugger off if they're inclined to.