Thank you for relaying your story German Doc.
I am about to go off on a bit of tangent because I wanted to comment on how messed up the Canadian system is in terms of retention... First of all Medical Education in Canada is subsidised by the government, otherwise medical students would be paying tuition fees comparable to the US. There is a huge difference between $18,000 CAN dollars per year and the American tuition rates of around $36,000 US dollars...
So now, if medical education is subsidised, and we are trying not only to maintain but also to improve our inefficient and inaccessible publicly funded health care system then why the hell are Canadian medical graduates even allowed to leave the country to go make lots of money in the US?
Perhaps we should have a commitment to practice in Canada for a certain amount of years? Maybe even a quota of specialities and locations that must be filled out throughout the country? In the Canadian military one must complete however many years as a GP before then can go off and chose a different area for instance.
Furthermore, should there be a change in the screening processes and in the admission policies currently being used by our publicly funded Medical Schools?
I believe that the top socio-economic tier of our society is continuously filling out most of the undergraduate entrance spots in medical schools all over Canada. I haven't looked at stats in a while but the last article I read (I will try to find it and post it here) about this issue showed that Canadian Medical Graduates are not representative of the average Canadian, neither economically nor ethnically. Why would a rich kid chose Family Medicine or anything even remotely community-based, which is what Canada needs, just so that they can make a shitty little salary instead of going to the United Stated and make over 300 thousand dollars a year as a specialist?
What kind of a system is this?
Here I am signing my life away in debts in order to get a student loans as big as a mortgage just so I can go to the UK in order to attend Medical School and after all that and all the years of hard work and financial constraints I have to jump through hoops just so I can come back and practice here?
The Canadian public keeps on hearing about the shortage of doctors in all areas, the long waiting times for surgeries, the lack of family doctors, the foreign trained medical doctors working in pizza delivery, and who is talking about the real issues??? Does the public even know what a sham all of this is? What lies at the root of these problems? The profile of the people who are going into Medicine and the focus of Medical education in this country are to blame.
Why is it that you should feel so lucky just to find a family doctor,even if he or she as huge A-hole to you, who doesn't look you in the eye, probably doesn't even know your name, and barely touches you when they are supposedly examining you? If your GP spends more than 5 minutes with you and allows you to even talk about ANOTHER problem you are having other than the one they will charge for then you are definitely lucky. But we think nothing of this because we are lucky enough just to HAVE FOUND a Family Doctor? Even if it takes you 3-4 weeks to schedule an appointment with them because they are overloaded, over worked and dissatisfied??
What about the people in small rural communities throughout Canada with chronic conditions such as diabetes, respiratory problems and cardiac issues, who have to put their names in the town's lottery system just so they can see a GP? These are the people that either end up dead or in critical condition in some Emergency Room somewhere because they ran out of insulin or their asthma puffer. These are people whose tax dollars are paying for some invisible health care system that they can't access!!!
Come on now!
We have to demand accountability from the policy makers, from the Medical Associations, from the Universities, not kiss their ass and beg to God that we'll find a spot to come back and practice here. Any region in Canada should be so lucky to have a physician who went through such long and difficult lengths just to get to practice Medicine because this person is probably more likely to be excellent in many aspects including intelligence, compassion and essentially respect for other people, unlike most of the physicians I have met and dealt with in Canada.
Maybe most of the people in this forum want to come back to Canada because their roots are here, their families, loved ones, friends , whatever...
But then if you have been one of the few who have made it back into the Canadian Health Care system then please, be an advocate for policy change. Talk to your colleagues, send a letter to your Medical Association, write a letter to the newspaper. Do something!!
Physicians aren't "healing machines"! Historically physicians have also been social agents in our communities but somehow in North America this role has diminished and physicians only stick to themselves and rarely step out of their comfort zone. Could this be one of the reasons why the public feels so distance from doctors? Is this right? Should people be afraid or suspicious of the medical system and the doctors that are treating them? Have we reached a point of no return?
