If you live on Cape Cod or the Islands, you've probably heard that there's a shortage of healthcare providers, especially primary care doctors.
But maybe you didn't know that there's a local group that's been working for the past six years to change that.
Dr. Mary O'Neill is a primary care doctor at the Community Health Center of Cape Cod and a per diem hospitalist at Cape Cod Healthcare. She's also the secretary and co-founder of the Cape Cod and Islands Physician Council.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke with Mary recently to learn more about what her group is doing to support healthcare providers in the Cape and Islands region.
Gilda Geist What is the Cape Cod and Islands Physician Council and how long has the organization been around?
Mary O’Neill I first landed on the Cape in 2015, and around 2018, my colleagues and I started to notice when we were trying to get people home from the hospital, that increasing numbers of patients had no primary care physician. It was really difficult to plug people in, and we started to confer and it turns out that 50 physicians had left the Cape between 2015 and 2018 or 2019, mostly primary care physicians. It really kind of gelled us into trying to determine why. Basically, we were concerned about physician wellness within the community. Why are so many doctors leaving Cape Cod, et cetera, in the prime of their careers? Is there anything we can do about it? And we started getting together. We've met every first Wednesday of the month since 2019. I can tell you, without naming names, that at least five physicians have not left the Cape as a result of our organization over the last couple of years. Five physicians is not all that many so far, but the connections that we're making and kind of the seeds that we are planting are going to bear fruit eventually. And, you know, one physician can affect anywhere from 2,000 to 20,000 people over the course of their career. That winds up adding up to a lot of Cape Codders' health that is impacted.
GG We hear all the time that Cape Cod has a doctor shortage. What kinds of things do you do to address that?
MO Yeah, so actually we were born at Cape Cod Hospital. Twelve of us would get together, and we started having in-person meetings and social gatherings between the Cape Cod Healthcare staff and what have you. And then during COVID, we set things up so that different departments could at least Zoom one another and get to know one another. And that was actually very successful. It was actually really a lot of fun to meet some of the other specialists, the orthopedists, the urologists, the folks over in Falmouth — you see their names, but you don't know who they are. And that kind of helped carry people forward and kind of gel our staff and our colleagues during that tough period of time. And then as we've come out of the pandemic, we've actually had nine really wonderful events over the course of the last couple of years between Falmouth and all the way up to Truro, not just within Cape Cod Healthcare, but all of the organizations on the Cape. We've had folks from Outer Cape Health Services come down, the community health centers obviously, South Coast, New England Baptist, Harbor Health [Services] folks, Duffy [Health Center] folks, MDVIP, and a range of different specialties. There's actually data saying that if your doctors know one another, your patient outcome is better — like your medical care will be better. It's really important to us to know and trust the individual that we're referring a patient to. And so more than just for our own support, it's really just totally about getting patients the best care that we possibly can. And this is just one way to be able to do it in a fun and social and educational way.
GG How is your group thinking about or talking about the public health landscape under the Trump administration with Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services?
MO I am so glad you asked! We actually wrote him a letter. About a month and a half ago, we put together a letter on behalf of the Cape Cod and Islands Physician Council, advocating for Cape Cod's physicians supporting Cape Cod physicians in order to support the Cape Cod community. His office did get back to us. He's too busy right now, but hopefully he will meet with us at some point. We would love for him to understand the struggles of his fellow Cape Codders. Not everybody has a primary care physician. Not everybody can access specialized care in an expedited fashion. If he does agree to meet with us, it would be wonderful, because we would be able to lay that out for him, and the struggles that our patients are going through, how that affects physicians, and how we can kind of mutually maybe change some of the insurance rules that are causing everyone to be miserable, getting rid of some of middlemen that block patient care. And so I hope that we're able to meet with one another and I hope he'll be very receptive because he's from here, and I presume, I'm sure he does, care about Cape Codders as much as we do who live here year-round.
