Thank you, and good morning.
I'm Doug Munkley, and I have been a full-time emergency physician in a high-volume community hospital in Niagara for over 30 years. I've also worked in walk-in, urgent care and primary care settings. As well, I'm the medical director for Niagara EMS, the ambulance service that provides care to over 500,000 people in our region.
Niagara is a wonderful place to live and work. However, we too have an acute lack of family physicians, and we're designated as such by the Ontario Ministry of Health. That lack of physicians, both GPs and specialists, is felt in a number of ways. Clearly, to those individuals who do not have access to primary care, there are adverse health effects from lack of disease prevention and delayed diagnosis and treatment. For those awaiting specialist consultation or surgery, those delays also have profound effects.
However, there are other consequences of the lack of family physicians or after-hours physician services. Patients often have nowhere to go except the emergency department. Provincial telehealth services, which are risk averse, will direct patients to the ED, as will doctor's offices. These factors are part of a systemic issue causing widespread emergency department overcrowding. When EDs are overcrowded, ambulances cannot offload their patients and, therefore, they are not available to respond to emergency calls.
What are some of the solutions to this doctor shortage?
There are 3,500 Canadian students studying in highly respected medical schools around the world. We need to provide a fair and equitable process for Canadian medical students studying abroad to obtain residency positions, and we need to remove the licensing barriers to enable these physicians to come home to practise in Canada.