Open letter to Hinton & area patients

We are writing to ensure that Hinton and area patients are aware that your local family physicians are not currently able to meet all the needs of the clinic and hospital, and what some of the effects may be for your health care.

Over the past several years, our family physician workforce has decreased, and at the same time we've struggled to recruit new doctors.  We are currently short 3-5 family doctors.  This is not unique to Hinton, but is affecting most rural communities.  The effect locally has been felt mostly at the clinic so far: inability to get a family doctor, and difficulty accessing same-day clinic appointments.  Your family doctors also do various types of hospital work, and the competing demands of these responsibilities is now exceeding 24/7/365.  Your doctors are currently in varying stages of burnout, which is defined as a combination of exhaustion, difficulty engaging, and reduced effectiveness.  We have realized (hopefully not too late) that doing everything, all the time, with inadequate physician resources, is no longer possible, and will simply accelerate our losses.

As a clinic, we are committed to maintaining access to primary care in Hinton, partly because primary care keeps patients out of the ER/hospital.  We are working hard to improve clinic access using online booking (see www.hintonmed.com), as well as to reduce excessive paperwork burdens.  We appreciate all efforts by patients to ensure requests for "form" completion are necessary and pre-completed to the best of your ability, and by employers to eliminate requests for "work notes".  We also appreciate the patience and support you show the clinic staff during these challenging times for everyone.

As a physician group, we are carefully assessing how stretched each of us can go before breaking, and are working with Alberta Health Services to determine how to ration scarce physician workforce resources to best meet patient needs at the hospital.  We are currently unable to cover all shifts in the ER, and your ER only remains open based on last-minute locum (short-term) physician availability.  We are concerned about the posibility of ER closures, and the only reason we would contemplate that is to avoid losing more of us to burnout, creating even more closures - in some ways like choosing to cut off an arm, in order to save a life.  We also anticipate changes to how lower-acuity patients are managed in the ER, particularly overnight.  As physicians, we are acutely aware that burnout affects our nurses as well, and ask for your same patience and support as the hospital manages these issues.

The solution is multi-faceted (although recruiting more doctors is a critical step) and not simple or short-term, and we as physicians do not make those decisions.  Primary care is significantly devalued in our system, and it will take considerable time to see improvements.  We very much appreciate your patience and support as your physicians and local hospital work through this unprecedented situation for Hinton.

Sincerely,

Hinton family physicians group