A Vancouver Island doctor says his specialty is being “swamped” and facing a backlog of thousands of referrals.
Dr. Paul Winston is a physiatrist, specializing in rehabilitating patients with neurological disorders such as spinal injuries and strokes.
He told Global News that his clinic at Victoria General Hospital faces a backlog of 700 cases, while the two other clinics on the island have waitlists of more than 1,000 patients each.
“We are completely incapable of hiring more people because of this Monty Python Kafkaesque barrier for a test that is so normal and unencumbered in the rest of Canada — where you just graduate, you start testing,” Winston said.
“In B.C., the process could take up to 10 months to a year to get a doctor just be able to perform the test.”
Winston said B.C. has the highest standards in Canada, which is not a bad thing, but other provinces don’t have the same requirements to start working as doctors.
“I moved here 18 years ago and it took me about five months just to find anyone in the government who could help me set up because nobody knew,” he said.
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“And over the last 18 years, at times I had to call the Doctors of B.C. Ombudsman because there were five different ministries in B.C.; MSP, Health Insurance BC, Teleplan, all of these agencies required just to allow you to do the test, who would not coordinate to issue a licence.”
Finally, he worked with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC to show how none of the provincial agencies would work together to create a solution to licencing.
Winston said that in provinces such as Ontario and Quebec, people can graduate and start work.
He said there is a lack of standard operating protocol.
Winston is calling on the provincial health minister to cut through the regulations and red tape he says are preventing more physiatrists from practicing in B.C.
B.C. is one of the few places in Canada where offering remote and outreach clinics are banned, forcing patients to drive for many hours for testing.
When I moved here I learned that “We’re the only province that required the exam, but at that time UBC was the only Canadian University that refused to allow the graduating residents to write the exam,” he said.
“So they can’t start practicing. So you have the only province that doesn’t let doctors practice without the license and then you don’t let write the exam them practice.”
They had to stay in Vancouver for an extra year of unpaid training, so the chances of moving to smaller cities goes down. He worked on a national campaign of all universities to show that only UBC prevented its residents from practicing, and the UBC Division of physiatry immediately changed to allow the graduating residents to write the licencing exam. It remains a huge barrier to recruiting from other provinces.
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