By Murray Sherriffs
The Hudson family medicine clinic has announced that it will close April 1, citing the impossibility of continuing with Bill 2 in place.
Some 11,000 clients will have to find others ways to have their medical needs tended to and is the only bilingual family medicine outlet in the Vaudreuil-Soulanges area.
Dr. Tara McCarty, a family doctorand a co-owner of the clinic says that the closure is because three of the seven doctors who practice there will be leaving Quebec.
She says that this is “…pretty devastating” and that the law is pressuring doctors into giving “unsafe care to patients: We’ll be told what, whom to see, when to see them, how often to see them, how quickly to see them—that is not only dangerous.”
Last night, Premier Legault and Fédération des médecins omnipraticiens du Québec president Dr. Marc-André Amyot announced that the two parties will “resume formal discussions immediately.”
Dr. McCarty says that the resumption of negotiations will have no impact on the clinic’s closure and that only the law’s suspension would suffice.
In the coming week, each patient will receive a separate message directly from their own family doctor, indicating whether they will continue practising.
One patient said “I don’t understand how they could pass something so obviously destructive to medicine. It’s as if they intend to dramatically harm public health in Quebec—astonishing!”
