Six doctors at a Kingston clinic are planning to retire at the end of May. This will leave more than 8,000 patients without a primary care doctor in a few short months.
Dr. Nicholas Cristoveanu has been a family doctor for 42 years. He will leave Frontenac Medical Associates this spring along with five other doctors who are also planning to retire.
Cristoveanu said that he struggled with a mix of guilt, sadness, and relief when he decided to hang up his stethoscope.
“There’s a lot of worry about leaving the patients,” he said about the 1,800 people on his list, which can include up to four generations of the same family in some cases.
“It’s really hard. It makes you feel a lot.”
Millions of people in Ontario don’t have a family doctor, and the same is true in Kingston. The clinic and city have been trying to bring in new doctors, but there are still tens of thousands of people who need them.
‘The perfect storm
Cristoveanu said that this shows a problem with the whole system.
A study by CBC News that came out in January found that more than 80% of family doctors in Kingston were not taking on new patients.
None of the 125 family doctors who were known to be practicing at the time told CBC that they were taking new patients from the public.
The Kingston Area Health Care Task Force’s 2020 report also found that about 29,000 people in the city did not have a family doctor.
Craig Desjardins, the city’s director of strategy, innovation, and partnerships, who is in charge of recruiting doctors, said that number is still about right. He estimated that more than 20,000 people don’t have a doctor in the city.
He said that the sudden loss of six doctors was a “disaster.”
Desjardins said, “That’s like the perfect storm.”
Kingston has been able to get 10 new family doctors since the city council agreed to spend $2 million on the effort.
It is giving doctors up to $100,000 if they agree to work in the area for at least five years. The goal is to get 15 more doctors in the area in the next eight years.
Desjardins says that officials are in serious talks with four or five more, but doctors are still retiring, so the additions haven’t cut down on patient wait lists.
“It makes me think of the story about the Dutch boy who put his finger in the dyke to stop the water,” he said. “We’re not really getting anywhere.”
He said that health care is a provincial issue and that the city would like more money from the Ontario government and an Ontario-wide plan for getting doctors that doesn’t put communities against each other.
The government says that Ontario is “first in the country.
A Ministry of Health spokesperson told CBC that since the current government took office in 2018, nearly 8,000 doctors have signed up to work in Ontario.
A spokesperson, Hannah Jensen, wrote in the email that 90% of Ontarians have a family doctor or primary health care provider, which makes the province the best in the country.
Jenson also said that the government has added jobs at medical schools and made it easier for health care workers with degrees from other countries to get jobs in Ontario.
Cristoveanu said that he and the other doctors at the clinic have been trying for years to give it a shot of “younger blood.”
They put ads in medical magazines, got in touch with medical residents who were leaving, and even tried recruiting services, but nothing worked.
When a patient loses his or her “quarterback,
Cristoveanu said that the real burden is on the patients who don’t have a doctor to act as their “quarterback” and help them find specialists and navigate the system.
Soon, Devoe Dyette will have to face that fact. Dr. Gregory Patey was his doctor for 30 years, and he says that Dr. Patey is “caring” and “unreplaceable.”
Patey is one of the people who are planning to retire this spring, which will leave Dyette, his ex-wife, and his children without a doctor.
“We don’t know where to turn,” he said on Wednesday when he went to the clinic. “It’s very scary.”
Six doctors will leave the clinic, but two will stay on.
One of the two doctors left, Dr. Lili Mileva, said that she has taken on as many of her colleagues’ patients as she can.
She doesn’t know how the health center will look when they leave.
Dr. Mileva said, “It makes me sad that I can’t help everyone.” “I have to say no for my own safety, because it’s physically impossible for me to take 8,000 patients.”
