UFPA polling results
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In June and July, as the opportunity to enter into the race for SFM presidency started to form as the natural next step to properly represent family doctors in Alberta, UFPA conducted a poll (you can still take this poll if you wish, part1 & part2, in that the data may be re-analyzed) to determine where doctors were currently at.

We found that rural and family doctors felt similar existential pressures on them. When the many responses were sorted for similar themes, eight core concerns arose (keeping in mind nuanced variations will be lost in a short form list):

  1. Business Autonomy: the ability to run one’s practice, in a business sense, as they see fit.

  2. Clinical Autonomy: the ability to make clinical decisions with your patient, within the auspices of the physician-patient relationship, based on patients’ individual needs, and physician’s skill, experience and judgement, without inappropriate government intrusion

  3. Political Autonomy: the rightful stewardship of the primary care system within the hands of those that employ and navigate that system: family doctors

  4. Devaluation of Family Medicine: the politically motivated government and public degradation of family physicians social value

  5. Working conditions and Pay: ever declining remuneration for your work, intrusion of unreasonable workload without your consent, lack of resources to address safety and wellbeing of physicians

  6. System Sustainability: the cumulative effects of all underminings of public healthcare and its practitioners, creating a trend where current expectation is that things will get worse, not better, until absolute collapse has occurred

  7. Relationship with Government: the hostility and deception embodied within the relationship between the provincial government and all physicians makes it nearly impossible to enact any initiative due to well-earned distrust

  8. Ineffective Representation: The ongoing fact that our representative methods have produced no significant alteration in the above concerns. Our current representative methods have garnered us no power, and as such, the entity which has the final say in policy (the government) has no compulsion to address these concerns.

What UFPA found was that these concerns were shared between rural and urban doctors, for FFS doctors and ARP doctors. But the priority of these concerns were weighted differently at times. The largest concerns were “Working Conditions and Pay” along with “Autonomies”. However rural physicians found their autonomies were more at threat, while urban physicians were more affected by pay/conditions.

Knowing this helps us to understand each other, to align with each other, and to seek ways to help each other out. But, part of knowing this is to keep seeking to learn more, so that no one is left behind. Do these concerns above match yours? If not, then your representatives need to hear your concerns, and you need to tell your representatives your concerns. Better yet, we need to pull together to make sure we are all representing together.

But, also, know that understanding all of family doctors’ concerns is the first step to also finding remedies for those concerns. Further yet, it creates the basis for effective negotiation policy. With this deep understanding of family doctors’ needs, we can demand remedies to address each one specifically. Further, we know what issues must be resolved in order to reach agreement.