Healthy? How you could lose your family doctor under new guidelines in Alberta

The Alberta Medical Association estimates there are about 650,000 Albertans without a family doctor.

But new guidelines from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta mean that if you are healthy or don’t visit the doctors office very often, and your family doctor is planning to trim their patient list — you could be looking for a new doctor.

Previously, doctors have used a lottery system when they needed to trim their patient list.

But the new guidelines, which were published on the College’s website a week ago, “recommend exercising professional judgment to establish a system for triaging patients based on their health needs.”

The guidelines state, “as an example, this could potentially involve discharging patients who do not have a high need for access to care or who have been absent from your practice for a significant period of time to make room for patients who require acute and/or active care.”

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Dr. Shelley Duggan, president of the Alberta Medical Association, said while doctors would “rather everybody be able to stay attached to their family physician,” the new guidelines “make sense.”

Duggan said trimming patient lists is not an easy task, but sometimes it is needed — for example, if a doctor is getting close to retirement and scaling back their practice or can’t manage the number of patients they have.

“If you have a shortage of docs, then perhaps those that need the most amount of attention, because they have the most amount of medical problems and needs, and you know keeping those people attached to a family doctor is probably the best approach,” added Duggan.

“Let’s say I needed to reduce my patient size by 100 and 20 had congestive heart failure — those are probably not the people you want without a doctor in the world.”

Duggan said all Alberta doctors are stressed, particularly those in family medicine and cutting the number of patients is always a last resort.