‘We’re getting completely bogged down with these requests and feeling completely overwhelmed’
Oct 17, 2024
Family doctors in Ottawa are seeing an influx of public servants looking for medical notes to support work-from-home requests, putting added strain on an already overburdened health-care system.
Dr. Roozbeh Matin, who practises in Barrhaven, said he’s been noticing the trend for months, ever since the federal government announced plans to mandate public servants to work from the office more often.
“This is a systemic problem that all of us physicians in the Ottawa area are noticing,” he said. “We have been basically inundated with requests from our civil servant patients requesting various sorts of accommodation.”
The actual numbers might not seem so daunting: Matin gets about two to four request per week, while Dr. Alex Duong has seen a few dozen since the spring at his family medicine practice in Vanier.