The College of Family Physicians of Canada is being asked to “pause, hold and maybe stop” its plans to increase the time it takes to train a family doctor from two years to three — as some medical students, family doctors and provincial health ministers express their opposition.
“Our class, the class of 2027, is going to be the first that’s impacted by this change in residency length,” said Yash Verma, a first-year medical student at the University of Toronto.
“It feels like that’s something that’s out of our control and that we have no power to change at all.”
Verma said he first heard about the plan from CBC News in September. Alarmed, he asked his classmates for their thoughts.
He says he heard a recurring theme: “If this third year were to happen, they would not become family doctors.”
Canada is way, way short on primary care providers, especially in rural and remote areas, yes. Nurse-practitioners can only fill in so many of the gaps left by the insufficient number of family physicians, and they also take time to train. We have emergency departments closing because of lack of personnel, and it’s literally killing people to have to drive forty or more minutes to the nearest hospital that’s open when they have a heart attack.
Forcing new physicians to practice for a year somewhere other than a major city would be much more useful than sending them back to school for an extra year.
I’m not sure you understand what residency consists of. Family residents (at least in SK) already have rural rotations where they spend several months in one or more rural practices.
I’m in Ontario, and the northern areas of the province (like, anywhere north of Barrie) have been continuously short of doctors for the past forty years. Some slots here for medical residents go unfilled for years at a time, from what I understand—they do have a right to refuse a position they don’t want. And very few of them want to go to, say, Kapuskasing. There is one medical school that obliges graduates to remain in the north for a time, but they simply don’t graduate enough people. Rural voters have more pull in Saskatchewan than northern voters do here, so there’s also little incentive for the government to change things.
It does make a difference. But I’m sure it’s not easy to access those residencies.