By: Lori Culbert
In difficult times for attracting doctors to family practice, B.C. has filled all its training slots. The University of B.C. will begin in July to train 186 recent medical school graduates to become family physicians, filling all of its available residency spots at a time when there is a severe shortage of primary-care doctors across Canada.
It’s an important milestone because nearly one million British Columbians do not have a family doctor, and those that do fear they may lose their general practitioner to retirement or burnout.
While training positions for new family physicians have increased in Canada, other provinces were unable to fill all their positions — indicating that not enough new doctors across the country are interested in this type of medicine, despite the demand for their services.
In this province, several factors helped UBC attract enough candidates, including the government’s agreeing back in October to improve how family doctors are paid, said Dr. Roger Wong, vice-dean of education in the faculty of medicine. But he cautioned all the efforts being made in B.C. to mitigate the primary-care crisis will not produce instant results, as it will take at least two years for these 186 graduates to complete their training. “I remain hopeful that the situation will improve in British Columbia. I recognize that it takes time because medical education and training takes time,” Wong said.
The B.C. College of Family Physicians says being a family doctor is challenging because of the administrative demands of running an office, which takes time away from patients, and the “chronic underfunding of proper, comprehensive” health care.
Similar complaints are heard across the country and shed light on the lacklustre recruitment statistics.
The Canadian Resident Matching Service, which matches new med school grads with specialization training, says there were 1,629 family medicine positions available in 2023 across Canada, by far the medical discipline with the highest number of training spaces.
In late April, though, the organization announced it was unable to fill 100 of those spots after doing two placement rounds. And that’s a big blow, given that 6.5 million Canadians don’t have a family doctor or nurse practitioner they see regularly.
Quebec was unable to fill 73 of its family-medicine training positions, and Alberta had 22 openings left, according to data provided to Postmedia by the service. Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia had a small number of spots left vacant, while B.C., Manitoba and Saskatchewan filled theirs.
Birth-to-death care
Dr. Marisa Levesque is one of the 186 new medical school grads who has chosen to pursue family medicine through UBC. Raised in Vernon, she completed her UBC medical degree in Kelowna and has now been matched with a rural family medicine residency. She will do her first year of training at Kelowna General Hospital and in various family practices in the Okanagan, followed by months-long stints in rural towns in her second year. While she has heard the criticisms about family medicine, she said she was drawn to the work after doing her medical school rotations with different types of physicians.
“I’ve met a lot of family doctors who really enjoy their careers, so I saw a lot of what’s possible to love about your career in family medicine,” Levesque said. “It’s the breadth of birth-to-death care. I want to be able to be involved in caring for neonates, caring for pediatric populations, for adults, for geriatric populations, to palliative care.”
Since her main experience with doctors, before entering medical school, was visiting family physicians while growing up, it felt natural to pursue this discipline.
“My family doctors were wonderful. I always felt like I could turn to them for anything,” Levesque said. “I found my people doing family medicine rotations. I really felt like I was being welcomed into a team and they were really engaged with teaching and really helping me take ownership of patient care.”
She is happy, though, that the B.C. government has acknowledged some of the challenges that face family doctors. Now, instead of receiving $30 to $40 a visit regardless of the reason for the patient’s illness, they will be paid based on time spent with patients, the complexity of their issues, how many people they see in a day, and the total number of patients attached to their practices.
She also knows there is a desperate need for the work she can do after her two-year training. “When I tell people I’m going into family medicine, (they say), ‘Well in two years I’ll be your patient.’ Because there are so few people here who have steady access to a family doctor,” Levesque said. “I do hear that a lot.” UBC has the highest number of family-medicine training positions of any Canadian university, followed by the University of Toronto with 165 and the Université de Montréal with 163. However, right now, it is the only university in B.C. to do this training, compared to Ontario, which has six schools offering a total of 538 spots, and Quebec with four institutions with 514 openings…
Source: vancouversun.com
