When Courtney Good moved to Quinte Region while pregnant with her first baby, she never imagined she’d be the one piecing together her daughter Cora’s healthcare for the first eight months of her life.
As a first-time mom and someone who values the security of having access to primary care, Good knew that she would need to find a family doctor for her unborn baby once settled in the region. However, coming from Toronto, a city with plenty of primary care providers (PCPs), Good didn’t realize how difficult it would be to get one here.
As her due date approached, she began to panic. “I thought you could just go to a doctor that said, ‘accepting new patients’ but that’s not how it is,” Good recalls, adding that Health Care Connect (HCC), Ontario’s registration system for linking unattached patients with PCPs, posed an additional challenge. She explains that she couldn’t use her doctor in Toronto as a back-up for Cora because to register with the system patients can’t be rostered with a PCP.
Despite registering with HCC while pregnant, Good was told that the waitlist was long, and it could be months before her daughter was connected to a PCP. Sadly, Good’s story is not unique in our region.
Catherine Walker, director at Quinte Health Care (QHC), reports that for the last three years an average of 11% of babies born at QHC have been discharged home without a PCP. That means that in our region, approximately 150 families each year are left to navigate a complex health care system for their infants on their own. While staggering, this number did not come as a surprise to Dr. Shalea Piteau, Chief of Pediatrics at QHC.
Piteau explains that while they ensure all critical newborn exams are done in the hospital prior to discharge, the hurdles for parents begin immediately as babies need to be seen within the first few days of life. Without access to a PCP, hospital staff advise parents to take their babies to Public Health, walk-in clinics or the emergency department for that first check-up, and beyond. Piteau says that those options are “less than ideal.”
Indeed, Good’s experience using Public Health as a primary care substitute was less than ideal. She recalls the frustration felt during an appointment for her daughter’s 4-month vaccines, “I had a series of questions and I was hoping that they would weigh her and do very basic things. But they couldn’t do any of that and they couldn’t really answer my questions,” she adds, “if anything had happened to Cora, if she was ill, if she had anything that was sort of irregular, then she would have really fell through the cracks.”
Paul Huras, CEO of the South East Local Health Integration Network (SE LHIN) agrees that it seems this population of patients has fallen through the cracks in our region. He admits that our community tends to dwell on the fact that we have the largest proportion of people over the age of 65 in the province. “The problem with this, is we do miss other populations that are in need,” Huras says, adding that provincially we are not responding as well as we should be to the many realities of family doctor shortages.
Good’s reality, like many other families in Quinte, was a year long attempt to string together a patchwork of healthcare for her daughter. “The scariest part of not having a family doctor for your baby is that you end up relying on the internet to be your doctor, and that’s not a good thing,” warns Good.
Special Thanks to Courtney Good, Paul Huras, Shalea Piteau and Catherine Walker for contributing to this piece as Interviewees.
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