Dear Editor:
As our township councillors get set to shoehorn more housing into Fergus and Elora, I wonder if they have stopped to consider this burning question: where will all the newcomers find doctors?
Right now, if you have no general practitioner (GP) for your day-to-day medical needs, the situation is dire and getting worse every day. Take my predicament. My GP quit three months ago and now I badly need to renew a prescription for medication he filled routinely for me for years (without it, within a few weeks, I face getting very sick).
Yet can I find anywhere to get this done? No.
My pharmacist blithely told me, “Oh, go to a walk in clinic.” But where – and how? The only clinic in this area (at Walmart) no long takes “walk-ins.” The only way you can get in there is to call at 4:30pm to make an appointment and pray that you don’t get a busy signal. But you always do. I know, I’ve tried it many times.
In desperation, I drove up to the clinic last night to try and make an appointment in person. But that’s not permitted. A harried-looking nurse came out from behind a locked door to admit a guy (who, lucky for him, had managed to reach them on the phone) and told me to just “keep trying.”
“Put your phone on speed dial. You may eventually get us. But we are seeing 100 patients a night – and we all work in doctors’ offices during the day,” she said.
So in other words, the possibility of getting my prescription filled there is grim. So I tried some new doctors’ offices in Arthur today and was told much the same thing. The sympathetic receptionist said “to try Guelph, Palmerston or Harriston. You may have better luck there.”
In the meantime, I am off my medication and getting desperate.
And the powers-that-be want to bring more people to live here? Are they crazy?
Sonia Day,
Fergus