Physician Assistants start in BC: far too few and embarrassingly overdue.
Times Colonist January 14th 2025
Commentary:
With great hullabaloo, our health authorities announce that BC’s first ever Physician Assistants (PA) are about to start, a so-called pilot project. Both of these individuals have been practicing PAs in Canada for over a decade. Over one thousand PAs have been employed across Canada over the past two decades! A survey among PAs years ago revealed that many of these, like these two new appointees, would move to BC if PA positions were available.
PAs fill an important void in our ability to provide adequate primary care, including its urgent component, where there is a drastic and disgraceful absence of such care. They can deal with a high proportion of those such patients allowing the physician to focus more on more serious patients. I recently sat for 13 hours with around forty others waiting to be seen in an ER. From talking to several of these, it was abundantly clear that a PA based in that ER could have satisfactorily dealt with most of the medical issues drastically reducing the unacceptable wait times.
The deficits in primary care have been headlines for years in BC and across the country. Why was BC the very last province to introduce this proven partial remedy to our crisis. Why did our government not recognize the success of other provincial PA programs? Why did multiple appeals for a PA program fall on deaf ears?
Our supposedly democratic system of government falls flat when it come to decision-making and accountability for its health care policies, which consume the largest portion of our tax dollars. The Minister of Health should be apologizing/explaining why we were deprived of PAs for so long and reassure us that such illogical and tardy decisions will be a thing of the past under her new leadership.
Adrian Fine BCHCM Volunteer