What have family doctors being doing for the past six months? A thread. This week lots of patients keep asking if it’s nice to be back at work. They’re shocked when I tell them we never closed, not even for a day. 1/

PPE was scarce and we knew very little about COVID. We scrambled to develop policies and procedures after hours, to install plexiglass and source more masks. We debated who to mask and when. We voraciously devoured every communication from public health. 2/

But we never closed. We dusted off old phone headsets and started phoning patients for appointments. We activated a brand new secure portal to send documents to our patients. We saw carefully-selected patients (babies, pregnant women, etc) in person 3/

For a while it was pretty quiet. People only called for very urgent needs. It gave us a bit of time to get organized. Many of us (myself included) volunteered to work on COVID assessment centres, to help out in emergency departments, and so on. 4/

The flow of patients picked up in May and June and has continued to accelerate. Since school went back, my office is literally the busiest we have ever been. We have had over 1000 phone calls some days. We spent thousands on a new telephone system to manage the demand. 5/

Everyone who waited in the early part of the pandemic needs to be seen now. We lost months of regular preventative care like Pap tests and are now trying to make up for lost time. And the parents - the poor parents whose kids have been sent home for school and who are having 6/

trouble getting a covid test. We are getting dozens of calls from them per day. Sadly we can’t do much to help, but we are trying. 7/

This week, for a lot of people, it felt like something broke. Like all the tough stuff in the world right now is just TOO MUCH. We’re all tired and the forecasts look bleak. We don’t know how long this will go on. 8/

Some of those tired, frustrated people are taking out their energy on our (also exhausted and overwhelmed) staff and on us doctors. We get it. We know you’re tired. We are too. But please know: we are working as hard as we can to help. We care and we want to make this better. 9/

Please, just try to muster up a little extra patience for us. We won’t abandon you. We’re doing our best. 10/10 #familymedicine #covidontario