My Take | Shut up and wait, your Canadian doctor is busy
- If we use waiting times as the key measure of efficient and timely delivery of treatment, Canadian taxpayers have been steadily getting declining healthcare since the 1990s
I was green with envy when I read how a My Take reader and fellow Canadian said he received excellent medical attention at the age of 77 back in his home country, after being an expat working overseas for a long time.
I can’t say the same about my own experience and those of my immediate family and closest friends in Canada, as I related in a previous column.
However, as we will see with the latest statistics below, it seems what we experience is quite common, whereas our reader has been exceptionally lucky. So I must congratulate him on his good fortune.
He said it took him just two weeks in 2019 to find a family doctor in Vancouver, British Columbia, and then again the same in Toronto, Ontario. There is no doubt that the situation was much better before the pandemic during which medical services in many parts of Canada were close to collapse.
Of these, 17 per cent had given up on looking for a family doctor while “almost one-third of all respondents (29 per cent) were trying to find a new family doctor and most have been looking for less than two years”.