The provincial government is hoping to have a new stop gap program for those waiting for a primary care physician operational province-wide in less than a year’s time.
NB Health Link, which has been operating in Moncton since July, allows doctors to provide primary care services to orphaned patients that after-hours clinics can’t provide, like carrying out blood tests, routine checkups, and consulting and adding to a patient’s medical record.
“The blood tests, the consult requests, all the requests that we do are all written in one EMR – that’s the electronic chart – so when the patient leaves everything is faxed directly, all of the results come back to us,” Isabelle-Anne Girouard, the program’s medical director, told reporters at a news conference Friday.
Service New Brunswick agents are in the process of contacting those on the growing waiting list in order to register them for the new service.
The clinics are staffed by doctors who are already employed full-time, either in private practice or in hospitals, who will work in blocks of either four or eight hours a week.
After-hours clinics, eVisit New Brunswick, a service which acts as a virtual after-hours care clinic, and NB Health Link all pull from the same pool of doctors.
Primary care physicians are paid $47.40 per visit in their regular practice.
Doctors will be paid roughly $45 per visit through NB Health Link compared to the $29.40 they are paid per visit in after-hours clinics and through eVisit NB.
While eVisit NB’s contract was originally set to end on March 31, 2022, health minister Bruce Fitch said the government is in talks to extend it.
Fitch insists this program is not meant to replace after-hours clinics.
“As things are evolving we’re thinking some can see this as a different way to practice, a new way to practice, with the new technology, using the one patient record, using technology that is advanced and medicine is advancing all the time,” he said Friday.
The program will be expanding to the Fredericton region before the end of the month, and the province plans to add it to the Campbellton region next.
New Brunswick Medical Society president Michèle Michaud told Global News Friday she is looking forward to seeing the whole province having access to the program.
“We will mostly be looking at how we can recruit more family physicians, how we can better attract them into community practices, better support them and optimize the way they work,” she said.
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