In the study whose results were published yesterday, theIRIS notes that the family medicine groups in Quebec, created 20 years ago, are a failure.
The Institute says they have failed to facilitate access to a family doctor.
Among the voices raised against the conclusions of the study, the Association of General Practitioners of Bas-Saint-Laurent is one of those who do not agree with what theIRIS exposed.
The president of the association, Dr. Josée Bouchard, says that the lack of staff is at the heart of the problem.
I believe that if we still had the same number of specialists and family doctors and if we had all the necessary staff that had been promised, the GMF would work perfectly and that we would have far fewer problems delivering services to the population,
she says.
The president of the Bas-Saint-Laurent Association of General Practitioners, Josée Bouchard, believes that FMGs do a lot with the resources allocated to them (archives).
Photo: Radio-Canada / Julie Tremblay
Dr. Bouchard points out that there was already a 25% shortage of personnel in the FMG before the pandemic and that many employees left the clinics to lend a hand during the health crisis without returning to work there.
She also notes that more and more medical students are opting for specialties.
Quebec invests more in family medicine
Dr. Bouchard hopes that the new agreement in principle concluded between Quebec and the Federation of General Practitioners will help improve the situation.
Under this agreement, patients registered with the family doctor access window will gradually be registered with a GMF.
500,000 Quebecers could be taken care of by a GMF by March 31, 2023, according to the Minister of Health.
The contribution of GMF to reduce the number of orphan patients is one of the main assets of this type of medical clinic, according to the director of professional services at the CISSS Gaspé, Dr. Nathalie Guilbeault. She also reminds that several of them have a component dedicated to teaching.
There are GMF universities that allow medical students, at different levels, to come to the Gaspé and see the practice in the regions, which is completely different from the practice in the city.
Dr. Nathalie Guilbeault praises the merits of FMGs in terms of retaining the medical students they train (archives).
Photo: Radio-Canada / Martin Toulgoat
She maintains that the type of FMG promotes regional recruitment. I have many doctors in the various local service networks who have been recruited through the GMF-U, so-called. And that, I think, is a very big advantage.
An incomplete study
The head of the regional department of family medicine at CISSS du Bas-Saint-Laurent and director of the FMG-U of Trois-Pistoles, Éric Lavoie, also reacted strongly to the study by the Institute for Socio-economic Research and Information.
The study argues that the ratio of patients seen by doctors between 2014 and 2021 only increased by 2%.
Éric Lavoie believes that this criterion used in the study is insufficient to judge the mission of the FMG.
The registration of a patient is an administrative indicator, it says nothing about the health of the population,
he defends himself.
Dr. Éric Lavoie, head of the Bas-Saint-Laurent regional department of general medicine, indicates that the IRIS study does not expose all the dimensions of FMG operations (archives).
Photo: Radio-Canada
Since the creation of FMG in 2002, Dr. Lavoie insisted that remarkable progress had been made and that they had even become a model of care.
” Would we be better off if there were no FMG? I do not think so. »
Dr. Lavoie prefers to look at progress rather than objectives. How is morbidity, mortality, diabetics doing? Do we do more interdisciplinarity? More research? Not all of these dimensions are addressed in the study.
With information from Roxanne Langlois and Perrine Bullant
Reference-ici.radio-canada.ca