Tens of thousands of names remain on P.E.I. patient registry, despite promise to eliminate it by April
'I made the most disastrous choice for my health,' says Islander who's been on the waitlist for 13 years
Despite a campaign promise made by former premier Dennis King in 2023, the Progressive Conservatives have not fulfilled their goal of eliminating Prince Edward Island's patient registry waitlist by April 2025.
When King made the commitment in March 2023 to get everyone off the patient registry two years after the election, there were 28,546 people on the registry.
But the waitlist has actually grown since the pledge was made. The total number of people on the registry sits at 37,431 as of the end of March 2025, according to Health P.E.I. CEO Melanie Fraser.
Melody Garnhum, who has been waiting to get a family doctor since 2012, said it's hard to hold out hope — but she's trying.
Garnhum put her name on the list when she moved from Ontario back to her home province of P.E.I. more than a decade ago.
She said she had a nurse practitioner when she first joined the registry, but in 2020 she felt she needed a physician because of her complex medical needs. Now, she has no health-care provider at all.
"I thought: OK, I'll come back to P.E.I. with my young family… I'll just call up one of the good old doctors here — or the one we had when I left — and just say, 'Hey, we moved back,' and we'll be fine," Garnhum said.
"Thirteen years on the waitlist… I made the most disastrous choice for my health."
Not acceptable, says Health P.E.I.
Waiting more than a decade for a primary care physician is not acceptable, said Fraser.
"Primary care is fundamental to health care," she said in an interview with CBC News.
"The best health-care systems have solid primary care, and that should be our focus."
Fraser said the promise made by the PCs was probably overly ambitious given the growth of the Island's population and the decline in health staffing.
But the work that's been done since then has been having an effect, she said.
In March, 837 people signed up for the patient registry, while 911 were affiliated with health providers.
"The numbers are actually telling us they're not getting further apart anymore," she said. "I would say we're not winning yet, but we're at that tipping point where we're starting to see that momentum in the right direction."
'It's almost a little embarrassing'
That momentum hasn't always come full circle.
Kayla Shoreman is a nurse practitioner — one of the types of health-care professionals people who join the patient registry are trying to receive care from.
But Shoreman said she's been on the waitlist herself for years.
"It's almost a little embarrassing," she said, adding that she worries about talking about it in front of co-workers because she doesn't want them to feel pressured to treat her.
"Sometimes I don't have the objectivity to know what I need. I would like to have a provider to bounce things off of and to give me that care, but I also know that I'm better equipped than a lot of people."
Shoreman said she's happy to wait her turn to be affiliated with a provider, but she didn't realize how long it would take when she first put her name on the list.
"I was willing to wait a year, a couple of years. I thought that was the norm," she said. "But now… I see that it's… sometimes up to 10 or more years before you're getting off that list."
Shoreman said she worries about others who are in the same situation who might not have the same advantages she does — an education in health care, knowing how to navigate the system and speaking English as her primary language.
"If I'm in this situation, there are people who have complex diseases who don't understand our health care as well as I do who are definitely struggling more than I do," she said.
"I think we need to start identifying people who are more disadvantaged… because those are the people who are getting left behind and who are falling ill because of this lack of primary care."
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With files from Sheehan Desjardins