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About one in five people on the North Shore don't have a family doctor, according to a recent poll by the North Shore News.
Sadly, the only surprising thing about that result is that the numbers aren't higher.
More generally, responses from both on and off the North Shore indicate about one in four don't have a family doctor.
Province-wide, it's estimated that about 900,000 people in B.C. don’t have family doctors.
At the beginning of June, there were 7,640 patients on a centralized wait list for a family doctor on the North Shore. But that doesn’t include many others who aren’t on the list.
Each month, as more family doctors retire, the challenge gets harder. Officially there are 287 general physicians working on the North Shore, according to the North Shore Division of Family Practice. But that number includes locums (doctors who fill in for regular physicians), doctors who work in salaried positions at Lions Gate Hospital and the Urgent and Primary Care Centre, as well as those working in specialized services like sports medicine and those who work part-time.
At least six family doctors have retired in recent months, while others have announced their plans to do so soon.
Full-time doctors on the North Shore can have more than 1,200 patients. When they retire, there’s rarely anyone to take their place.
North Shore News polled 3,657 North Shore News readers and asked the question: Do you have a family doctor?
The poll ran from 5/19/2022 to 7/12/2022. Of the 3,657 votes, we can determine that 1,460 are from within the community. The full results are as follows:
Results are based on an online study of adult North Shore News readers that are located in North Shore. The margin of error - which measures sample variability - is +/- 1.61%, 19 times out of 20.
North Shore News uses a variety of techniques to capture data, detect and prevent fraudulent votes, detect and prevent robots, and filter out non-local and duplicate votes.
