I’m a rural emergency room doctor — and I feel the need to publicly apologize.
I’m sorry that many of you are often not receiving the health care you need, in the right place or at the right time. And I’m sorry that many of you don’t have a primary care provider, that wait times are so long and that I sometimes see you in the hallway where you have little privacy. While this happening in our rural hospital in Kenora, Ont., I’ve seen similar experiences reflected in emergency rooms across the country.
So, I need you to believe me when I say that my colleagues and I cannot fix these problems ourselves. In fact, trying to fix the problem has pushed some of us to the point of leaving the profession — and the effort to look after ourselves may worsen services.
As a rural physician spouse, your family thanks you.
It is not one bit your fault. Incompetent government and educational institutions could see this coming for decades, but chose, and continue to choose to do nothing.
Boomers retiring and population growth are pretty obvious needs for more healthcare resources, not to mention not doing anything to help homelessness and addictions. Combined with that, med school faculty, at least in my home province, actively dissuade students from entering family medicine, and the university hasn’t increased its intake volume in years.
Everyone in rural medicine feels this pressure. The responsible thing is to keep the balance that keeps you healthy, for a physician who is there working the hours a typical worker might work is still providing far better service than if they weren’t there at all.
As long as you push the ama to push to educate more doctors and for universal health care, then I don’t think you have anything to feel bad about. We should have as many doctors as we need and should not be rationed based on wealth of the patients. We should be weeding out physcicians based on capability and not on the ability to stay awake for massive amounts of time.
Likewise, wealth shouldn’t be a barrier to entry to becoming a doctor. We need to re-think education.
I mean I know they used to have a program where medical school loans could be paid by working in rural communities. Its actually underserved but within the program working near a city was very competitive as that is where all the doctors wanted to work to get the loan forgiveness.
For a country with such a serious lack of doctors, why do we keep so many immigrants with medical degrees driving cabs?
Because immigrant doctors driving cabs has been a meme for as long as i’ve been alive and we didnt do anything about it until the system is on the verge of collapse
There were an estimated 259,695 IEHPs aged 18 to 64 residing in Canada in 2021
About 76% of IEHPs aged 18 to 64 were employed
Among employed IEHPs, 58% worked in health occupations
In other words: Of ~260k IHEPs, only ~115k work in healthcare. Meaning we have 145k internationally educated healthcare professionals not working in healthcare.
Sorry, when i said “meme” i didnt mean that IEHPs were not factually true
My point is that we’ve KNOWN for decades that this talent pool exists, but we didnt do anything about it until too late.
Do what you need to do to take care of yourself. “First, do no harm” applies to you as much as to anyone else.
You didn’t fail us.
We failed you.
