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Faculty Members in the News
Click here to see what Dr. Allyn Walsh, a family physician and full-time faculty member within the Department of Family Medicine has to say about the importance of family physicians within the health care system.
Family doctors call for investment in primary care
- by Paul Morse
January 26, 2011
Ontario’s family doctors say the province’s hospitals and emergency rooms will be overwhelmed by 2020 if more is not done to beef up family medicine and primary health care.
“We are making progress, but we have to kick it up a notch,” said Dr. Allyn Walsh, a Hamilton family doctor who is chair of the Ontario College of Family Physicians and a family medicine professor at McMaster University.
“It doesn’t take much of a stroll through a hospital to recognize the strain the hospital system is under. They do their job in acute care medicine extremely well but they are not designed to deliver primary care and chronic care medicine,” she said.
“That’s what family medicine does well.”
In its Vision 2020: Raising the Bar in Family Medicine and Ontario’s Primary Care Sector report released Wednesday, the OCFP called for more investment in family medicine to ensure sustained quality family care in the province.
“Research has shown over and over again that health care systems anchored in family medicine and primary care have the best patient outcomes at the least cost,” Walsh said.
The report, supported by a Harris-Decima poll, makes three key recommendations: That every Ontarian has a family doctor; that everyone gets a family doctor who works collaboratively with other health care professionals in teams and, that all Ontarians have an electronic health record.
Because over 900,000 Ontarians do not have a family doctor, hospitals and their emergency rooms face a higher burden to provide primary health care. The college says chronic illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, depression, certain cancers and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are on the rise and placing an increasingly heavy burden on hospitals to provide care.
Walsh says family medicine is really a gateway to the health care system.
“Chronic diseases are slow and with us for a long time when we have them. Family medicine and collaborative teams in family medicine help people manage their chronic diseases,” she said. “It’s not dramatic, but it requires a lot of work and energy to keep people as well as they could be, and is important in managing quality of life as well as costs.”
The OCFP’s Harris-Decima poll found that 91 percent of people with family physicians want their doctor to provide the majority of care for them and their family. Among the expectations are access to nurses, nurse practitioners, dietitians, pharmacists and social workers.
Of the people with family physicians, 43 percent also expect specialists to practice alongside their family doctor. As well, 33 percent expect access to mental health workers.