The annual premium offered to Quebec family physicians for each patient registered through the guichet d’accès à la première ligne, known as the GAP, has dropped by $20 – to $100 per patient annually.
The president of the Fédération des médecins omnipraticiens du Québec (FMOQ), Dr. Marc-André Amyot, presented the details of the agreement reached with the Quebec government the previous day to his members at noon on Friday.
Both parties seem satisfied with the agreement reached. Health Minister Christian Dubé pointed out on Thursday that the GAP bridge agreement would “preserve certain important principles, such as collective enrolment.”
Since 2022, an annual premium of $120 had been paid for each patient enrolled in a family medicine group (FMG) via the GAP. This was intended to enable FMGs to take on patients without a family doctor.
This agreement came to an end on May 31, resulting in a decrease in the number of physician appointments available on the GAP. At one point, the number of appointments offered via the primary care access window had dropped from 17,604 in the week of May 18 to 1,133 for the week of June 29.
In a press scrum on Thursday, Dr. Amyot suggested that the number of appointments offered via GAP should increase, compared with the decline observed since the end of the agreement. However, this will not return to “the previous state of GAP.”
He explained that some doctors who had decided to postpone retirement in order to offer GAP services may now have retired in the context of uncertainty as to whether the agreement would be renewed.
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–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews