The waitlist for a family doctor is the longest it’s ever been.
More than 69,000 people have put their names forward to get a doctor.
Health Minister Zach Churchill said there are a number of reasons the waitlist has ballooned to record length.
“It’s gone up over the last year for some key reasons,” he said. “We’ve got a bigger population now, so a lot of people have moved to Nova Scotia.”
He said 30 per cent of the people on the list identified themselves as new to the province or the community they are living in.
Churchill said there have also been several recent retirements and physician deaths.
He said, in addition to that, new doctors are also taking less patients, so it’s taking more doctors to replace the province’s former physicians.
Churchill said many of the retiring doctors had between 2000-3000 patients, but the doctors replacing them are taking on patient counts in the hundreds instead.
