A new report found that over 95% of people in developed countries have regular access to a primary care provider. However, Canada trails behind in key areas compared to other Organization for Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
Monday’s Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) report revealed that Canada has fewer physicians per capita and spends the least of its total health budget on primary care.
The report also found that Canada has a relatively high rate of maternal and infant mortality.
In contrast, every resident is automatically assigned a family doctor in Norway. The Netherlands offers 24-hour daily access to primary care through various after-hours care programs. In Britain, every newborn has to be registered with a local medical practice within six weeks of birth.
Data compiled by Statistics Canada in 2021 shows that 14.4% of Canadians lack a regular health care provider.
Additionally, older doctors are beginning to retire and younger doctors are moving away from traditional family practice, meaning the number of patients without access to primary care is expected to rise.
“We have to have a goal of guaranteed access to primary care and fund it appropriately,” said Tara Kiran, co-author of the report and a family doctor at St. Michael’s Hospital in an interview with the Globe and Mail.
“Until we do that, unfortunately, we have a situation where we have haves and have-nots,” said Kiran, who also works as a primary-care researcher at the University of Toronto.
The CMAJ report examined the countries of Britain, Finland, Norway and the Netherlands, where family doctors, known as general practitioners, play a pivotal role in health care.
In these countries, most doctors work in primary care, providing patients with ongoing attention from infancy to old age and patients are also offered after-hours care.
Registration with a general practitioner is either mandatory, automatic or strongly encouraged in these countries.
Contrastingly, in Canada, walk-in medical clinics are scarce and family doctors have more flexibility in terms of working hours, practice location and patient selection.
Many doctors will divide their time between office-based care and practicing in other places like hospitals, nursing homes and more specified clinics.
“These countries have really figured out how to hold their clinicians accountable for timely access to care,” said Kiran.
In 2022, 14.6% of Canadian doctors were 65 and older, according to data from the
Canadian Institute for Health Information, meaning that they are set to retire soon.
Currently, Canada has 24.4 physicians for every 10,000 residents, placing it behind the nine other OECD countries. The country with the most is Norway, with 50.5 physicians for every 10,000 residents.
According to the report, Canada spends 5.3% of its total healthcare budget on primary care, while the average for OECD countries is 8.1%.
In 2020, Canada’s infant mortality rate was 4.5 deaths for every 1,000 live births, the highest among the ten OECD countries.
The CMAJ report comes shortly after the publication of a study by the Fraser Institute which revealed that Canada also spends more on healthcare than the majority of the other high-income OECD countries that offer universal healthcare.
