Some BC residents wait five years to get connected with a doctor, here’s how politicians plan to change that

David Eby has touted the advancements his government has made in connecting BC residents with primary care providers during this election cycle, saying that a million more people have been attached to a family doctor or nurse practitioner since the BC NDP took office, with 4000 people being connected every week. 

But by the government’s own estimates, over a million BC residents are still without access to primary care — a 45% increase since the BC NDP took power. More detailed information from the province’s centralized primary care waitlist, the Health Connect Registry (HCR), is often denied to the media.  

A dataset from the registry, released via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request response published on the BC government website in June, provides some insight into how many people are waiting for primary care, and how long some people have to wait. 

The data shows the number of patients on the HCR waitlist from July 2023 to July 2025, the number of patients referred to primary care providers from April 2024 to July 2025, and the average and maximum (95th percentile) time that patients spend on the waitlist. 

This information is organized by Primary Care Network (PCN), a clinical network of primary care providers located in a geographical area.

PressProgress requested the same data for August 2025 to July 2026 from the Ministry of Health prior to the election, but this request was denied. A representative for the ministry suggested filing an FOI request for the updated data.

Scroll through the graph below.

Wait times vary across the province  

Based on this data, the average time a BC resident spends on the Health Connect Registry is 407 days, but some areas have maximum wait times that far exceed that. 

In the PCNs that see the longest wait times, Gabriola and Thompson, some patients spend over 2000 days, or over five years, waiting to be connected with a primary care provider.

While many of the PCNs with the longest wait times are rural and remote areas, urban areas of Vancouver Island, like Victoria and Nanaimo, also have some of the longest maximum wait times, at almost three years.  

“For me, what is surprising about the data, if you look at the 95th percentile wait time, some of those wait times are extremely long, and by the different PCN communities, it clearly varies,” Sabrina Wong, a professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in the Center for Health Services and the Chief Scientific Officer for the Canadian Primary Care Research consortium, told PressProgress. 

“It also looks like places like the Gulf Islands, some more of the rural regions obviously have issues getting people attached to a primary care provider.”

However, not all rural and remote communities have long wait times. In fact, according to this dataset, the shortest wait times in the province — an average and maximum wait time of just 26 days — are in Bella Bella, a community of less than 1200 people (according to the 2021 census) in the central coast region of BC. 

The second shortest wait times — an average of 151 days and a maximum of 397 days — are in qathet, a region on BC’s south coast that includes the city of Powell River.

Jason Sutherland, a professor in Health Services and Policy and the director of the Centre for Health Services and Policy Research in the UBC Faculty of Medicine, said it can be difficult to attract and retain physicians and nurse practitioners to small, rural communities. 

He pointed to universities in provinces like Newfoundland where there are initiatives to recruit medical students from small towns in order to increase the likelihood that those students will return to their communities after school.

Sutherland and Wong both offered a variety of reasons why HCR wait times vary widely throughout the province. 

On the provider side, there is an aging generation of doctors who are retiring from their practices, and their replacements don’t necessarily work in the same way. Sutherland said younger doctors tend to take on fewer clients or work less than full-time, and since younger doctors are more likely to be women, they’re more likely to take maternity leave. 

On the patient side, Wong pointed to the many complicating factors that can impact how and when patients are connected to primary care providers, like the preference for family members to all see the same provider, language requirements and transportation limitations, as well as patient preferences for certain types of providers. 

Election promises 

In their 2026 election platform, the BC NDP has highlighted the success of their efforts to hire and recruit from abroad more doctors and nurse practitioners, claiming that the province now has “the most doctors per capita in Canada.”

The BC Conservatives’ platform echoes this, pledging to “train more doctors here in BC, bring home Canadians who studied medicine abroad, and speed up international credential recognition.”

Additionally, the Conservatives promise to “launch an expert commission to bring proven solutions from other public systems to BC and cut wait times.”

The BC Conservatives did not respond to questions from PressProgress about how the party would improve HCR wait times. 

When asked how the BC NDP would reduce HCR wait times, a representative for the party referred PressProgress to a press release about plans to open 20 new team-based primary care clinics and fast-track training for international medical school graduates already in BC.

In response to a question from PressProgress about how the BC Green Party would improve HCR wait times, a representative for the party pointed to their plans to establish an integrated Community Health Centre (a form of team-based care that includes physicians, nurses, social workers, mental health professionals and other healthcare workers together under one roof) in every riding in the province. 

The party also pledges to maintain and expand healthcare funding and update loan forgiveness and paid practicum programs for all healthcare students.

The BC Green Party representative wrote that the HCR system “would be regularly evaluated to ensure information is accurate and consistent.” 

“We would also commit to routine, standardized public reporting, ensuring that people know what’s happening in their own communities, and that publicly available updates on waitlist sizes and service availability are released quarterly.”

Sutherland said investment in multidisciplinary care teams is one of the most promising policies when it comes to improving access to healthcare in BC.

“I would say the team-based care efforts are probably the ones that have the most promise right now, and you sort of see this a little bit with the governments allowing, say, a pharmacist to dispense low-risk drugs,” said Sutherland. “So you’re starting to see some of the scopes of practices of different professions change a little bit.”

“It’s just disappointing that we haven’t made headway on a lot of these important initiatives and that it’s not a bigger political issue.”

Waitlist numbers plateau

Wong said it’s still not clear to her whether patients are selected from the waitlist through a simple queuing system, or something more complex.

Sutherland said that one working hypothesis as to why wait times on Vancouver Island are so long is that the average age of residents is higher, meaning they require more complex care. “It makes them harder to treat,” said Sutherland.

Sutherland attributed the decrease in the number of patients on the waitlist from its height in February 2025 (when 404,642 people were on the waitlist) in part to the change in how some doctors are compensated, which essentially created financial incentives for some physicians to take patients who require more complex care.

Sutherland said the BC NDP’s efforts to aggressively recruit doctors from the US and the UK — relaxing foreign licensure requirements and streamlining the immigration processes — has also likely contributed to leveling off the number of people on the waitlist.  

However, Wong suspects this data is “probably an underreport of people who are waiting to get in to see a primary care provider.”

Wong said that even though the province’s efforts to create a single, centralized list of everyone in the province who would like to be connected with a primary care provider have been really helpful, there are still multiple ways to get on a waitlist, such as via the HCR online portal or through calling 811. Because there’s a missing piece of this data, she said it suggests to her that the HCR list isn’t sufficiently centralized. 

Lack of transparency and evaluation 

As part of her research, Wong requests data about the healthcare system through the government’s Health Data Platform BC, a process that she says “takes a really long time.” 

Wong said that while most of the real-time data about primary care access in BC is stored in PCNs, she thinks there’s a lack of transparency and evaluation in order to make sense of that data.

“I’m sure they all have learnings and innovations that just are not being shared with each other at a PCN level,” said Wong.

In the BC Policy Solutions Society’s discussion paper on the future of primary care in the province, author Marcy Cohen notes that because PCNs aren’t formally structured not-for-profit organizations, they don’t have the ability to raise or distribute funds, meaning they have mostly remained “largely operational rather than strategic and improvement-focused.”

“This means they do not have the community mandate or legal structure needed to initiate new programs to address gaps in access and service provision or to support local primary care organizations with the infrastructure increasingly needed,” writes Cohen.

Wong said more could be done to try to understand which innovations in improving access to team-based primary care are effective, and how those innovations could be adapted to other parts of the province.

“Mostly what happens with [healthcare funding] so far is that it all goes to operations, and operations without data and without evidence and evaluation is not super helpful because then you don’t really know if something is scalable and spreadable across the province,” said Wong. “And everyone, as this wait time list shows, is doing kind of their own thing.”