Alberta universities work to reduce physician shortage
Med school seats, rural clerkships, and aboriginal student spaces to train more cotors
BILL LUTHI THE GATEWAY (UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA)
EDMONTON (CUP) — A shortage of doctors is affecting provinces across Canada, but Alberta universities and health authorities are developing strategies to deal with the problem.
In 2003, Statistics Canada reported that more than 1.2 million Canadians were unable to find a regular doctor.
Edmonton’s Capital Health — an “academic health region” — works closely with the University of Alberta to train medical professionals and provide health services to the Edmonton region including some rural areas. According to Steve Buick, a spokesman for Capital Health, the population is getting older and their medical needs are becoming greater.
“We need the U of A to train more physicians so that we can hire them,” he said. “And that means we need the government of Alberta to fund more medical school seats at U of A and fund the ancillary resources.”
Doug Nelson, director of development and communications for the faculty of medicine and dentistry, echoed this need and indicated that the U of A plans to increase the number of seats in their undergraduate medical class.
“This is the first year of four years of increases,” he said, explaining that there will be five additional seats added to the program each year, increasing the class size to 150 students. A similar program is also in place at the University of Calgary, he said.
Buick explained that the problem is not just the number of doctors, but also the amount they work. He described what he sees as a trend developing in younger doctors who see fewer patients than physicians did a decade ago.
“It’s an issue of changes in the whole next generation of younger physicians. More encompassing studies have found that today’s younger physicians overall, men and women, are working around a fifth less as measured by the number of patients they see,” he said. “They are seeing about a fifth fewer patients per nominal full-time position than physicians of the same age did 10 years ago.”
The U of C also has a family medicine clerkship, which allows students in their third year of medical school to work in a rural hospital or doctor’s office under the supervision of experienced physicians.
The U of A is working on a similar program, Nelson said.
“We’re in the process of developing a rural clerkship, which will allow a number of our third-year students to do some of their clerkship in a rural community,” Nelson said.
“Hopefully, it will encourage them to stay and practice in those areas, as well some of the physicians in our extended undergraduate medical class, [and] draw students from a rural background.”
Buick indicated that aboriginal medicine and the need for the recruitment of aboriginal doctors are also important issues that need to be looked at.
“There’s certainly a concern to engage aboriginals particularly,” Buick confirmed. Nelson explained that the U of A sets aside two of the expanded spots each year for aboriginal students.
“We have the largest aboriginal medicine program in the country,” he said.
In addition to training new doctors, the U of C and U of A also credit foreign doctors through the Alberta international medical graduate program.
Historically, the training and crediting of foreign doctors has been one of the strategies used to address Canada’s rural doctor shortage, according to Nelson.
Alberta is recruiting a number of doctors from South Africa, Nelson said. “They typically do a rural rotation as a part of their qualification to practice medicine in Canada. Our post-graduate medical education program helps in the crediting of those individuals so we can get them credentialed and practising as soon as possible,” Nelson said.
