Many family doctors and people helping them out are sick with Covid-19 themselves. However, the issue about their possible replacement remains unresolved, said the president of Latvian Association of General Practitioners Sarmīte Veide.
He said the first cases when family doctor practices have ended up completely without medical workers have appeared in Latvia. Now they have to search for replacements on their own. Family doctors that take over patients from colleagues are not paid extra.
There haven’t been any cases when family doctors were not able to find replacements so far. However Veide has concerns this could result in more infection cases.
The president of the association stresses that it is highly important for the country to have a clear action plan if Covid-19 infection rates continue going up.
«We have to pay attention what happens in other countries. Nevertheless, primarily we have to focus on the situation in our country. […] We should be able to predict how the situation could develop in 2-3 weeks so that we know how to act to generate a plan and how to act depending on hospital workload, family doctor workload, infection indexes, etc.,» said Veide.
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When asked if and how big a problem is caused by the fact that people have to wait a long time for Covid-19 test results, the family doctor said the appearance of Omicron symptoms does not change the treatment regardless of a positive or negative test result. However, long queues present big problems for patients.
Commenting on the workload experienced by family doctors this Covid-19 wave, Veide admitted it is very large. «If we see 9 000-10 000 Covid-19 patients every day, this means 9-10 new patients every day for every family doctor. Infection lasts on average about seven days. This means every family doctor has about 50-60 patients to call up every day. This takes 4-5 hours of time, and there there’s also daily patient admission,» says the doctor.
Veide concluded that there isn’t a single family doctor in Latvia who works eight hours a day – most work 10-12 hours or more.
Family doctors forced to replace colleagues, but capacity is not unlimited
