Quebec agrees with family physicians to strengthen front-line healthcare

The government has reached an agreement with its general practitioners to move forward with its project to deploy a front-line health access counter (GAP).

• Read also: Nearly one million Quebecers waiting for a family doctor

With this project set out in Minister Christian Dubé’s plan to overhaul the health care system, Quebec hopes to improve access to the health care system for the hundreds of thousands of Quebecers who do not have a family doctor.

“I salute the willingness of the Federation of General Practitioners of Quebec (FMOQ) to put forward new ideas and their openness to seeing access to the first line differently. […] I am convinced that together, we can change things for the good of the population and our health system,” commented Mr. Dubé in a press release announcing this agreement.

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Historic tentative agreement reached with the @FMOQ.
3 principles:
– Gradual registration of hundreds of thousands of patients waiting at the GAMF for a family medicine group
-Access to your family doctor between 36 and 72 hours for urgent needs
– GAP deployment

— Christian Dubé (@cdube_sante) May 1, 2022

Pending the deployment of the GAP, Quebecers waiting at the Family Doctor Access Window “will gradually be registered with a family medicine group (GMF), giving priority to the most vulnerable patients”, specified the Ministry of Health. Health and Social Services, which aims to achieve this objective by March 2023.

Moreover, under the agreement, patients who have a family doctor will still have to be able to access it within a maximum of 36 to 72 hours, depending on the urgency of their problem. “In order to promote this change in practice, doctors will have to reserve a proportion of appointment slots for urgent needs according to the best practices of adapted access”, it was specified.

For its part, the FMOQ recalled that its members will not be able to solve all the problems of access to the health care system on their own, especially since, according to them, there are regarding 1,000 general practitioners in the system.

“It is time to do things differently in Quebec, in particular by sharing the collective responsibility for access to care with other health professionals and by investing massively in our first line of care. […] This agreement clearly seems to us to be a good step in this direction,” said Dr.^r Marc-André Amyot, president of the FMOQ.