Nova Scotia health minister pleading with population without a family doctor

But we have to stretch ourselves and we have to work really, really hard. We want our province to grow. Health Minister Michelle Thompson says a growing population and retirement of family doctors are to blame for a growing list. Currently, the province is well off its target for its wait list, which is over 160,000 Nova Scotians on the need of Family Practice registry, which is continuously grown for months. I mean Nova Scotians are stretched beyond belief. I think that Nova Scotians deserve to be attached to primary care. I think that Nova Scotians deserve to know. That if they get sick, they will be taken care of by our health care system. So I think, you know, Premier Houston will say that these are the problems of growth and we accept those. The opposition Liberals say the province's strategy to expand the scope for pharmacists isn't going far enough for people who need to see a family doctor. The problem is only going to get worse. And we've got more than twice as many people without a family doctor. We've got wait times that for emergency in our emergency departments, for ambulance care that have doubled, tripled in some some region. That long wait list means a crunch to get more family doctors into the system and Nova Scotia Health continues to scramble to get more doctors into the province as the population continues to grow. We have had net gains year over year and I can tell you that this year in particular, as an example, we have for something like 30% higher than we were at the same time last year. So we have more physicians coming. So I I think people should feel heartened. We're going to, we're going to continue to recruit and I do expect that over time that those numbers will reduce. Zach Power, Global News, Halifax.