New president of Doctors Nova Scotia advocating for a Primary Care Action Team

Dr. Leisha Hawker had a busy first week as president of Doctors Nova Scotia. 

A family doctor based in Halifax, Hawker has been in practice for roughly a decade. She tells CityNews Halifax that over the years, she’s seen more and more of her colleagues struggling to keep up with the workload, something that hinders their ability to provide the high quality of care Nova Scotians deserve.

Over the course of her one-year term, Hawker is aiming to work with the government to create a Recruitment and Retention Committee, as well as a Primary Care Action Team.

“Both of those things together hopefully would improve primary care,” she said. “Primary care really is the foundation for a strong healthcare system. For everything else to work, we need primary care to be functioning.”

While the PC government already opened the Office for Recruitment and Retention, she believes a committee would ensure doctors and other stakeholders can meet on a monthly basis to provide feedback and for accountability purposes. Currently, Doctors Nova Scotia meets regularly with members of the provincial Health Authority and the Department of Health and Wellness.

On Thursday, Health Minister Michelle Thompson announced a new pilot project to help streamline recruitment efforts for early-career physicians trained in collaborative care while ensuring a physician is available for same-day or next-day appointments when their family doctor isn’t.

The catch: participating family doctors won’t see the bonus until the end of the pilot project in March 2023, provided they earn more under the new model.

Hawker hopes the pilot project will prove successful and that it will permanently implement the new funding model. 

“The billing codes haven't really evolved to adequately support the work that physicians currently do,” she said, noting that the province’s population is aging and services are becoming more complex as people get sicker.

There are currently a record 94,855 Nova Scotians on the waitlist for a family doctor, something Hawker also believes needs to be addressed with a sense of urgency.

“If we look at last month, about 3,000 that were on the list found a family practice, but in that same time, almost double that number (5,700) were added to the registry,” she said, noting the number of people without a family doctor in Nova Scotia makes up nearly 10 per cent of the province’s population.

The pilot prject will initially start with 19 doctors at three clinics in Cheticamp, New Minas and Upper Tantallon, before expanding in the coming weeks to three more clinics employing 30 additional doctors.