N.S. Health removes family doctor waitlist information from data reporting website

Information about the number of people looking for a family doctor has been removed from Nova Scotia Health's public reporting data website.

Members of the NDP raised the issue during question period on Friday at Province House.

Data on the Action for Health public reporting website about the number of people seeking a family physician has not been updated since last June, when the health authority paused the updates to validate whether everyone on the list still needed a doctor.

Instead, the health authority has been issuing news releases at the start of each month to update the numbers. But that release lacks the detailed information the dashboard contained, including need broken down by community and the reasons why people were removed from the waitlist or added to it.

As of the beginning of February, 104,324 people in Nova Scotia were looking for a family doctor.  Now the tab is removed from the dashboard.

"That is the way we're going to do it for now," Health Minister Michelle Thompson told reporters at Province House.

"Once that validation work is over, we'll look at what is the best way to communicate on an ongoing basis."

The minister could not say how much longer it would take to complete the validation work and she would not commit to restoring the information on the dashboard.

"I'm committed to restoring regular updates in a different way," she said.

NDP Leader Claudia Chender said the removal of the list is "part of the pattern of secrecy and a reduction in accountability" by the Progressive Conservatives.

The community-by-community level of detail is important so people can understand what's happening across the province and measure the government's efforts to help the system, she told reporters.

"The more information that we can have, the better we can understand whether any progress is being made on health care."

Liberal House leader Iain Rankin suggested the removal of the list from the dashboard was politically motivated. He doesn't think the government will be able to get the list under 70,000 people, the size of the registry when the Progressive Conservatives came to power in 2021.

"I think that they were overpromising on their plan to fix health care and despite all their initiatives — some of them good — they won't ever get that list to below where they said they were going to," he told reporters.

Thompson said she doesn't think the list will ever reach zero, but it's her goal to get it to below five per cent of the provincial population. That would translate to about 50,000 people.