In her retirement, Valerie Vaughan-Hines enjoys bird-watching from her porch and looking for a pair of bald eagles that have nested across the lake from her home in Mount Uniacke, N.S. But lately, the 65-year-old has been spending a lot more time than she wants to looking for a family doctor.

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It's bad enough to learn you're losing your family doctor, says one Nova Scotia woman, but being asked to pay hundreds of dollars to access years of medical records adds insult to injury. "We have already enough distress right now knowing that we're losing our family doctor," says Cornelia Schneider. "So on top of that, [to] have to pay … is really upsetting." Schneider learned her physician was closing her practice in the north end of Halifax in a letter earlier this month.

I’ve worked as a family doctor in Nova Scotia’s public health sector for a decade. These days, I’m at a collaborative health centre in Halifax that offers primary care, dental care, mental-health support and other services. I’ve been watching our provincial system inch closer and closer to collapse since I became a physician back in 2013. It’s a story that’s now common to most other provinces, but Nova Scotia has its own specific problems: 14 per cent of the people who live here have no family doctor and, worse, a quarter of our working physicians are older than 60.