The waiting game: Saskatoon patients struggle amid doctor shortage

Saskatoon’s shortage of family physicians is leaving walk-in clinics in the city with a lot more work to handle.

Shirley Vhadera and her daughter have only lived in Saskatoon for about three months. They moved from Australia in the summer, and since they arrived, Vhadera said she hasn’t been able to get a family doctor for herself and her daughter.

Instead, they’ve been relying on the Medi Clinic on 8th Street in Saskatoon for medical care. After Sheryl started throwing up on Wednesday evening, Vhadera said she decided it was time to take her in for medical help.

“The doctors here are so good. They’re amazing. They really help us,” Vhadera said.

But there’s always a wait. It’s a big drawback for the single mom.

“It’s always like one hour, two hours,” she said.

On Thursday, Vhadera had to take the day off work to accommodate the two-and-a-half hour wait for a doctor to see her daughter.

When the pair first arrived in Saskatoon, Vhadera said she asked the receptionist at the clinic how she should go about finding a family doctor. The receptionist showed her how to look online, but there were few options at the time, and none in the city near where she lived.

It’s concerning to the mom that they don’t have a regular face to see for their health care. And not being able to make an appointment means she has to try to juggle work for hours-long waits whenever she or her daughter need care.

Christina Mao does have a family doctor she can go to, but when she tried to schedule an appointment because of a persistent sore throat and cough, her doctor’s office told her that her physician was fully booked up.

The wait wasn’t terribly long — she was able to get an appointment in the mid-afternoon the following day — but it’s longer than Mao would like to wait for care. She said had to wait 50 minutes just for her call to get through to reception at her doctor’s office. She said they advised her to go to the walk-in clinic.

However, after almost two hours into waiting at the Medi Clinic, Mao was thinking she might need to try again the following day.

“I can see in the clinic there are so many people waiting in the lines,” Mao said.

Like Vhadera, Mao also took time off of work to go to the clinic, and still had work to do upon her return to the office.

“If it’s more than two hours, that is just way too long,” Mao said.

Mao said she feels sad knowing how long and hard doctors in Saskatoon are working right now, while still being unable to take on new patients.

“They have families. They have work-life balance as well, but they have so many patients that don’t have a family physician to visit.”
She called the situation bad for people and hard for patients like herself.

The Government of Saskatchewan recently launched a plan aiming to recruit more than 1,000 more health care professionals to the province, but some, including the Saskatchewan NDP and the head of the Saskatchewan Association of Nurse Practitioners, have said more needs to be done to address the urgent issue.