Doctors differ on pediatricians’ role in child primary care

Doctors agree that cooperation between family doctors and pediatricians should improve, but differ on how they should divide day-to-day work, LSM reported. A State Audit Office review found that one in 10 family doctor practices provides no, or very little, care for children, while only 56% of children older than one receive annual preventive check-ups.

Some 13% of family doctors plan to close their practices in the coming years, potentially leaving almost 33,000 children without regular care. No doctors are planning to work in those areas and take over the patients. One proposed response is to assign pediatricians to support several practices or specific regions.

Until 2018, a primary care pediatrician’s practice needed at least 300 patients. The threshold was later raised to 800 children for a practice to be considered full, said Sigita Alhimoviča, head of the National Health Service’s Vidzeme branch. Practices struggled to register that many children, she said, so it was decided not to establish new practices of this type.

Nine primary care pediatricians remain in Latvia: five in Riga, two in Zemgale, one in Kurzeme and one in Vidzeme. Some family doctors also have pediatrician certificates, and children make up about half of their patients. These practices largely date from a time when pediatricians and internists retrained as family doctors.