· CBC News · A
Finding a family doctor in British Columbia is almost impossible and policy decisions made decades ago could be partly to blame. When Mike Harcourt became premier of B.C. in 1991, he appointed Elizabeth Cull as health minister, a position she held until 1993.
In her role, Cull received a report on the state of health care in B.C. titled “Closer to Home: Summary of the Report of the British Columbia Royal Commission on Health-Care Costs.” “It concluded that there was a mismatch between the health-care professionals that we needed and what we actually had,” Cull said, speaking to CBC’s On the Island. The report found that B.C. had more family doctors than it needed, and that the number of physicians provincewide had increased by more than 50 per cent since the 1970s. It also found they were seeing fewer patients than anywhere else in Canada.
In order to reduce costs, it was recommended immigrant physicians not be allowed to practise in B.C., that international medical students be made to leave the province after graduation, and that domestic graduates train in fields where there were shortages — which, at the time, did not include family medicine.
Cull said those recommendations were followed but, in hindsight, “There were unintended consequences of simply curtailing the supply of physicians.”
