Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
There's a shortage of GPs across the country. It's a much larger economic issue. Canada has an extremely low amount of medical school spots, that are extremely competitive to get into. Many students come out of medical school with large amounts of debt, and many competitive people don't want to live middle class lifestyles. Convincing medical students to willingly become GPs is a difficult task.
Even if you increased pay, it probably wouldn't fix the issue. The cost of living and property is so out of site, that giving GPs and extra $20-50k a year (which would not be a popular move), wouldn't change a thing.
It's also just as much to do with generational bottleknecking. For the last 30 years, they didn't need many doctors, as babyboomers had all the spots. Those doctors are retiring on mass and there's no one to replace them. The medical schools all maintained the same amount of medical school spots for decades, as the Gen X doctors entering the field were complaining about not having enough jobs available.
it's all a mess.
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don't disagree at all with your general points
I will say Alberta was in a position (based on pay, affordability and other factors) to at least be out in front of what is a national problem- in my opinion only (others may disagree) this 'advantage' has been blown by other factors through and coming out of COVID, mostly based on adversarial government positions, but not entirely
further (and this would not be specific to Alberta) in addition to 'boomers' retiring, I do believe you have docs at increasingly younger ages looking at a way out or a scale back, and younger generations looking at entirely different lifestyle based calculations that make them unlikely to recreate the work model of older genX, let alone boomer and earlier. (there are legit demographic and other reasons for this, so not necessarily blaming anyone but I think it's true- either way that means we need to build that in to any solutions)