N.S. primary care waitlist continues to shrink, details remain scarce

Nova Scotia's health authority last month trimmed more than 6,000 names off the list of people looking for a primary care provider, but it remains nearly twice as long as the province's target.

As of Feb. 3, the need-a-family-practice registry had 104,324 names on it, representing just shy of 10 per cent of the population. The province has a target of five per cent. Nova Scotia Health shared the latest numbers from the registry in a news release Thursday.

The list, which some see as a bellwether for the health-care crisis, has been shrinking for half a year.

Last summer, Nova Scotia Health started calling people on the list to find out if they're still living in the province and still looking to be attached to a family doctor or nurse practitioner. The health authority says the validation process is meant to result in a more accurate picture of the need for primary care.

Up until last June, Nova Scotia Health had a long-standing practice of posting a detailed geographic breakdown of the registry on its data dashboard, including information from dozens of regions within each of the four health zones. 

The health authority has also previously provided a breakdown of the reasons people gave for joining the registry — for instance, being new to the area or because their family doctor had retired.

None of that information has been released publicly for the past six months. Nova Scotia Health deferred CBC's questions about the dashboard to the Department of Health and Wellness. The department did not immediately provide a response.

No data on why people were removed from the list

In one update last fall, the health authority explained how many people had come off the list because they were matched with a family doctor and how many were removed because of the validation process — that is, they'd found a provider on their own, left the province or died.

For the second month in a row, that information has also been left out. A spokesperson for Nova Scotia Health said it will not be reporting that data "until we are confident it can be reported to the public in a timely and accurate way."

"This data must be pulled manually, and we are currently not able to report on it in a way that accurately reflects the current state. This data is dynamic, and by the time the data has been pulled, it may have changed significantly," they said in an email.

The only information provided by Nova Scotia Health is that 6,132 people were attached or removed as a result of validation work done in January.

Help with onboarding, recruiting more providers

The health authority told CBC the drop is thanks in part to more support and resources being directed at family practice clinics to help them onboard new patients, as well as recruitment and retention efforts.

On the same day as the health authority update, the Department of Health and Wellness posted a quarterly update to its health-care data website. The update shows the province netted 10 new family doctors last year and 40 new nurse practitioners.

Last year the province had 121 family doctors per 100,000 Nova Scotians. The government has a target of reaching 135 family doctors per 100,000.