Fact check: Are there really 800,000 Albertans without a family doctor?

The Alberta New Democratic Party, which has made health care one of its priority issues during the current election contest, says up to 800,000 Albertans do not have a family doctor.

"Currently, up to 800,000 Albertans don't have access to a family doctor. My message to every one of them is that under an NDP government, if you need a doctor, you'll have a doctor," said NDP Leader Rachel Notley at a press conference in Red Deer on May 2.

Is 800,000 really accurate? Unfortunately, there are no recent or definitive statistics available to answer this question.

650,000 or 800,000?

The lack of data is all the more glaring as the party itself has changed this number as the election campaign kicked into high gear.

In the weeks leading into the provincial election, the NDP said there were roughly 650,000 people without a doctor, saying they based the number on data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI). The Alberta Medical Association has also cited the same figure.

More recently, the NDP bumped the number to 800,000. The increased number comes from a different source. For the latest statistic, the NDP refers to a survey conducted by Angus Reid in August 2022.

Roughly 18 per cent of respondents in Alberta said they don't have a family doctor. If the data is extrapolated to the entire population of the province, that's over 800,000 people.

According to the NDP's campaign team, the number better reflects the reality of the health professionals with whom the party has spoken.

However, the survey is non-probabilistic, and doesn't reflect the scale of Alberta's population. It's also based on a very small sample size, with fewer than 250 respondents. It should also be noted that a quarter of those surveyed who did not have a doctor said they were not looking for one, either.

Better than other provinces

Finding other reliable sources on this family doctor shortage is a puzzle. According to the provincial health ministry, Alberta doctors are not required to report patient counts to the health authority.

Alberta Health Services instead refers to data from Statistics Canada, but the most recent reports are from 2021.

The picture the data from the federal agency paints is less bleak, however.

According to Statistics Canada, 12.7 per cent of people over the age of 12 did not have a regular health-care provider in 2021 in Alberta. Applying this number to the entire population comes to roughly 540,000 people.

This data also shows that the situation has been steadily improving since 2015.

Alberta is also still far from having the worst access to family doctors in the country. The province is slightly below the Canadian national average, which is 14 per cent of people without a family doctor.

Is the situation getting worse?

But the province has seen strong population growth since 2021, with an increase of nearly 165,000 people in one year.

Kerry McBrien, a doctor and associate professor of the O'Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary, says the number of visits to the Find a Doctor website doubled between April 2021 and March 2022.

"While it's not possible to quantify the number of people looking, the fact that [the number of searches] doubled is an important sign," explains McBrien.

The number of doctors available in certain communities is decreasing, which can put a strain on remaining doctors and leave some without a family doctor, she adds.

"It's hard to put definitive numbers on it," says McBrien, an advocate for stronger data collection to monitor and measure the effectiveness of the health-care system.