Five internal medicine specialists at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown say they will no longer accept non-urgent referrals starting Jan. 21 because wait times for their services have become “unsafe and unsustainable.”
The five doctors who work at the internal medicine clinic at the QEH advised their colleagues of the change in a memo sent on Dec. 20 that was shared with CBC News.
The memo says the clinic is “experiencing increasingly unsafe and unsustainable wait times for new consults and follow-up patient visits,” and that the decision by the doctors to limit referrals “was made only after reaching a point where we can no longer provide sustainable and safe care.”
The doctors said wait times for their services have grown from weeks, to months, to more than a year in some cases. According to the memo:
- Patients who were flagged as urgent by emergency room doctors are waiting three months for an initial consult where the wait time used to be less than two weeks.
- Semi-urgent cases from the ER are waiting more than a year, where the wait times used to be eight weeks.
- Semi-urgent cases referred by primary care providers are waiting 12-18 months instead of two to three months.
- Three-month followup appointments for medical and cardiac patients are instead taking up to a year, with similar delays for six and 12-month followups.
According to the Canadian Medical Association, specialists in internal medicine are trained to diagnose and manage diseases involving any of the organ systems, and to manage seriously ill patients suffering from advanced illness and/or diseases of more than one system.
The memo signed off by the five physicians says all referral requests will be acknowledged within 14 days, and an estimated wait time for a consult will be communicated. The doctors ask that all referring health-care providers continue to monitor their patients for “clinical stability.”
One problem they cite, however, is that about a 2,000 of their current patients — representing one of every four patients at the clinic — have no primary care provider, meaning they require additional support for followup care.
The physicians say they will gradually start accepting new non-urgent referrals once wait times reach “an agreed-upon safe level.”
