Want more family doctors in Ontario? Pay them better, say physicians

No. Make more. Flood the market. Pay them reasonably good but fix their work-life balance by having more. Asking for more money is the unimaginative response that people do whenever something is wrong - doctors seem to have plenty of money, so it is probably something else that is wrong.

Perhaps make deals to train more, and send people to train, in less expensive foreign markets rather than depleting those markets of their much needed doctors by luring them to Canada. People should have the right to move to a different country but blatant brain drain tactics have always seemed morally dubious to me.

From what I understand Doctors and Dentists that immigrate into Canada have a hard long road of needing to be "recertified". This means extensive money spent going back to university for a few years prior to even being able to work in the field or even open their own practice.

A family friend was a dentist overseas with his own practice he ran for years, it took him years to be "recertified" like many other dentists coming to Canada. He spent thousands of dollars in fees alone.

His wife was a dentist as well but ended up not going through the process when they moved as money was tight for both of them. Instead she had opted to recertify as a dentil hygienist.

Both are amazing in dentistry and IMO are better dentists than the few different practices I have been through in my life. So good that I travel 2 hours to go specifically to their practice.
- Why are people so obsessed with getting new doctors from immigration? Where's the call to increase schooling capacity?
  
  Our capacity for training doctors and nurses hasn't increased in decades. Every year hundreds of potential health care workers get turned away from schooling because we don't have the capacity. And everyone big idea is to ... not fix the root problem.
  
  Any way you spin it this problem will take years to solve. Whether through immigration or through increased training capacity, it's going to take years. So we might as well let Canadians get trained for these jobs. We clearly want to, as evidenced by the greater number of applicants than seats.
Paying more will attract more. We train plenty now but they all go where doctoring is most lucrative, which is not Ontario.
- Exactly. We need to accept that it is a competitive role and after 8+ years of schooling, you would go to where the pay is best too.
- And it would be less lucrative if there were more doctors, because you need there to be a significant demand in order to be paid a lot.
  
  The problem is at both ends. We need more doctors, and we need more of them to stay here. It's not an either/or issue.
I get what you're saying, and as a med hopeful that would be my dream, but the result would be an undesirable salary for Canadian doctors. They'd simply move to the States and make literally hundreds of thousands more. Not to mention that doctors have massive amounts of debt from school, as well as large overhead costs when running practices.

I can no longer empathize. My family doctor lives in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Toronto, when there's a holiday she takes the whole week off, when it's a major holiday, two weeks off easily. She goes on vacation with her family 2-3 times a year and no longer even does in person visits. I haven't had a vacation in a decade and I can't afford to stop for even a day, so I can't relate to this article

I would argue nursing staff, physiotherapists, mental health workers, dietitians, etc need more of a pay raise. They're often working in the same settings and at least as many hours in hospitals and family health clinics but paid a small fraction of doctora' wages despite tons of schooling.

Unfortunately, Canada has always had an issue of doctors leaving to the USA due to better pay there. Although I have little sympathy for them given how much they're already earning, I'd rather them have an inflated salary than corporate bailouts, governmental beurocratic inefficiencies, CEOs, etc so I'll live with it.

Edit: also because the alternative is moving to a private system where you can be certain they'll be overpaid, but healthcare will be categorically worse.
My doctor started handing off the fees to his patients. You want a skin tag removed? 50 bucks. You want a sick note? 50 bucks. Alternatively, you can pay for a subscription of like 200 dollars a year or something to cover all of those electives.

It's stupid. What happened to "do no harm"? I guess it doesn't count when it's financial harm.

I pay my fucking taxes. Allot them correctly so I don't have to double pay my physicians because you've decided to allocate taxes to nonsense bullshit instead of core social welfare programs.

Fuck ~~Rob~~ Doug Ford and the Cons. They're bleeding the healthcare system dry so they can claim it's a failure and privatize it. They spend more money subsidizing private clinics and hospitals than actually funding the regular ones.
- Rob Ford
  
  Do you mean Doug, or are we speaking ill of the dead?
I kind of understand what they're saying, that they too are losing ground vs inflation, but I agree with you, it's pretty hard to empathize. Especially when they say stupid stuff like, "I'm sorry, 2.8 per cent is a bagel and coffee," and, "I got a haircut yesterday and it cost me $40."

Do, or you will get like us in Québec, 700+ family doctors moved to private. You want to see one in a few hours? it's 150$. Else go to the ER and wait 24-48h

I'm not sure if that's reason we have people without family doctors in Ontario. According to the latest stats I could find (2019), Ontario has the lowest percentage of residents without a family doctor. Besides a few outliers, basically everywhere in the world has a shortage of doctors so at best you're drawing down on other jurisdictions. The only other point they make is that many doctors aren't choosing family medicine, but I don't feel like we have a glut of specialists?