Long COVID patients urge B.C. Conservatives to restore NDP cuts to virtual care

The clinic was going to use money from the fees to hire a child psychologist to help homebound kids with all the questions they have about their illness, said Dyment. But that plan will now be scrapped.

“I think the assumption was that the money that was being earned in these groups is being put in the doctors’ pockets. It’s not. It’s being used to hire allied health.”

The cuts were discussed with the clinic over a year but announced two days before the B.C. NDP called a snap election. The election backfired for the NDP and resulted in the party losing to a B.C. Conservative majority.

Dyment is calling on the new government to reverse this decision that could shift the burden of care back to already overcrowded emergency rooms.

“I treat children with long COVID, something no other clinic in the country does. No one even knows how to diagnose or treat these conditions in B.C.,” she said. “My heart just breaks for these kids and their families. They finally got a little bit of hope for the future, and now the government is taking that away to save a few pennies.”

The B.C. Tories said the new government hasn’t been sworn in yet, so no decisions have been made on this or any other policy matter.

“Once we’re in office, we’ll look at it carefully,” said Alex Shiff, director of media relations for the Conservative party, who deferred questions to the appropriate ministry.

Communication staff for the Health Ministry are still in caretaker mode postelection and not taking questions, but, according to the ministry, changes to group virtual appointments were developed over a year.

During that time, the ministry says, the changes were shared with the clinic. In May, the clinic confirmed in writing to the ministry that it believed its model could be financially viable with a cap of 30 patients per group session and didn’t discuss possible support from government, according to the ministry.

The clinic has more than 8,500 patients and is run by internal medicine doctors Ric Arseneau and Jane McKay. It treats patients for a variety of chronic diseases, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis, which causes extreme fatigue, PoTS, a heart rate condition, and long COVID.

McKay said it was “disturbingly disingenuous” for the ministry to state that the clinic could operate under a 30-patient cap when it made no mention of the reduced fees when deciding on that number.

The clinic worked on a plan to preserve access to care under a 40 per cent capacity reduction, including recruiting doctors. But the plan assumed “based on the government’s own messaging, that per-patient fees would remain essentially the same. That did not happen,” said McKay.

Every patient gets a one-on-one assessment at intake, and then they come back in online group settings for information, prescription renewals and more. For example, patients might visit an online group to learn about a medication, and then decide if they would like to try it. Then a physician will decide if it’s right for the patient.

The clinic estimates more than 300,000 British Columbians are living with long COVID, and 78,000 of them are youth.

The clinic was designed to shorten wait times to see internal medicine specialists, as well as connecting patients to specialist care, according to Lifeline B.C., a group that advocates for patients with long-term chronic illness.

By capping virtual group sizes at 30 patients and reducing the fees, Lifeline says the patients will get sicker, requiring more frequent appointments with and increasing the burden on family physicians, who already struggle with overwork, burnout and more patients than the system has capacity to serve.

ticrawford@postmedia.com

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