Just over a year ago, I was browsing my news feed and saw a link to a survey asking Canadian’s about their experience with primary health care. I clicked on it, and that is how I became involved with the OurCare Project.
I was one of over 9,000 people who filled out the survey. At the end of the survey I ticked the checkbox saying I was willing to be contacted if they had any questions about my answers. Then I won the lottery and was picked to be one of the 31 people who participated in the BC Priorities Panel. We had several Zoom meetings where presenters explained what primary health care is supposed to look like and how it currently works in B.C. We also had presentations on how other countries around the world manage primary health care for their citizens.
In June 2023, we all met for three days at SFU in Vancouver. After more presentations about remote care, how community health centres functioned and the challenges with providing care in the Downtown East side, our group worked together to draft a report on what we considered were the essentials that primary health care must provide to Canadians.
We were an amazing, diverse group of people. OK, I am a healthy, old white guy who was born and lived most of my life in the B.C. Interior, but our panel had people from the four corners of the globe. Some people’s ancestor’s had lived in B.C. for thousands of years, others had arrived in the last decade. Some healthy, other living with chronic health challenges. And you know what? There was almost nothing we disagreed over. Our biggest “fights” were over whether to use “insist” or “demand” in a paragraph.
If we were not personally trying to find a family doctor, we all knew people who were. We’d all had experience with waiting to get tests, waiting to get appointments with specialists or waiting to see anyone we could at a walk in clinic. And we all knew it shouldn’t be that way.
On Monday, Feb. 26, OurCare released their final report consolidating the results of the five provincial panels. As a self-confessed news hound, I am deeply offended that even I struggled to find any mention of the release of this report. With nearly 1 in 4 Canadians without a primary care provider, we need to fix this problem. Just recruiting more doctors is not the only or best way of doing this.
Just read the report: Primary Care Needs Our Care.
Ken Raynor
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