Dr. Martina Scholtens left family practice to become a psychiatrist and is now faced with a new dilemma — how to treat patients who don’t have the support of a family doctor.
Scholtens attended a B.C. Health Care Matters rally at the B.C. legislature on Saturday to support those calling on the province to improve access to family doctors. About 200 people attended.
Scholtens was a family doctor before switching to psychiatry. She recently graduated and plans to set up her own practice.
“Being a family doctor for 12 years and experiencing all the challenges with that work in our current system in B.C., I could not imagine myself working in family practice for another 30 years,” said Scholtens.
Scholtens attended the rally with her husband, Peter, and two of their four children.
“If the system had been different and changes had been made, I could have very well stayed a family physician, so in a way, I feel my own personal responsibility with respect to the shortage,” said Scholtens.
As a resident psychiatrist, Scholtens saw the other side of the family doctor shortage — patients who came to her sicker because they didn’t have adequate primary care, patients who couldn’t be helped to the same degree without the support of a family physician.
“Certainly there are patients who are unwell who are waiting far too long to see a psychiatrist and who, if they had had a family physician — well trained in dealing with mental-health issues — they would not be as severely impacted by the time they see a psychiatrist.”
While working as a resident psychiatrist, the first question she asked patients was whether they had a family doctor “because of how much impact that would have on their care going forward,” said Scholtens. “I knew that their care and prognosis was so much better” with a family doctor.
An estimated one million people in B.C. do not have a family doctor, about 100,000 on the south Island.
When Scholtens opens her practice she has to decide whether to take on patients who don’t have a family doctor.
“If I only see patients who have a family physician, that’s unfair to those very many patients in Victoria who do not have a family doctor,” said Scholtens.
“But if I see patients without a family doctor then it reduces my capacity to see patients in general because I don’t have the family doctor that I can refer back to, who can kind of quarterback the care.”
Scholtens went to medical school with one of the physician speakers at the rally, Dr. Jennifer Lush, an outspoken advocate for the health-care system, but it was Scholtens’ husband Peter, who works in software, who encouraged the family to attend.
