Good news! The Yukon government is going to build a new “surgical tower” at the Whitehorse hospital.
Last fall I wrote about the crisis in surgical services, wondering why the government had ignored consultant recommendations from way back in 2018 that our growing and aging population needed more surgical capacity.
A new surgical ward would be wonderful, even if overdue.
However, your grandmother’s hip doesn’t need to be worried about suddenly getting replaced months or years before it was expecting to.
When the Yukon government and Yukon Hospital Corporation divulged the news in response to a question from the Yukon News last week, they did not share specifics like design, budget or opening day.
In fact, when local orthopaedic surgeon Adam McIntyre was informed of the news during an interview about why he was leaving the Yukon and moving his practice to Campbell River, he said it came as a pleasant surprise.
The News reported that he was “being driven out of the Yukon due to ‘systematic underfunding’ of the territory’s surgical services.”
Normally, if you are trying to keep a valued employee from quitting, you give them a raise or a new operating room before they move to Campbell River. Not after.
I heard from other senior health professionals at the hospital. They learned they were getting a new surgical tower from the News too.
Anyway, Dr. McIntyre told the News that three orthopaedic surgeons are the bare minimum for our hospital. Now we have one.
As they try to find more orthopaedic surgeons, the government can promise candidates a new operating room at some undefined point in the future.
Dr. McIntyre also told the News he had been advocating for a long time for more operating rooms, as have other doctors, nurses and patients.
So far, so depressing about surgical services. But what about the family doctor crisis, which I also wrote about last fall.
Underfunding is a key problem here too. The net pay for a family doctor, after paying office rent, assistant salaries, malpractice insurance, unpaid hours doing paperwork and so on, is much lower than other career options like working in Emergency or shifts in the hospital.
The only thing that’s surprising about the slow erosion of the number of family doctors in the Yukon is that it hasn’t happened faster. As I mentioned in the fall, many doctors continue their family practices out of a sense of duty despite knowing it is a bad financial decision.
This delays the problem until they retire, but makes it no easier to find newly graduated doctors willing to take on all that overhead in return for long hours and getting $56 -- pre-overhead and pre-tax -- to hear you describe the weird rash you got on vacation in Mexico.
There was more bad news on the family doctor front last week. The News reported that Whitehorse Medical was shutting down. Two of its doctors are closing their family practices, although they may continue to work elsewhere in the health system. Their exit letter said that they too had been “lobbying the Yukon government,” and closed by saying “it was challenging to work within a system with insufficient support for family medicine.”
The closure of their practice probably adds hundreds of Yukoners to the estimated 10,000 already without a family doctor (based on Canadian Institute for Health Information data that 22.5 per cent of Yukoners aged 18 and over do not have a regular health care provider).
While there were stories in the media about some Whitehorse Medical patients being surprised, rumours have been circulating since well before Christmas.
Like surgical services, the deteriorating family doctor situation has been known to the government for years. A full two years ago, B.C. got the message and boosted funding for family doctors. And yet, somehow, here we are with one of Whitehorse’s major family medical centres closing down.
It makes you wonder what else Yukon health care professionals can do. If we didn’t hear of plans for a new surgical tower until Dr. McIntyre’s departure, do they really need to ask a family doctor to move to Campbell River to get the government’s attention?
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.
