Group of Alberta doctors resigning from serving hospital in Lac La Biche

replace them...bye bye

Damned right, people can use Telehealth by Babylon and support the Saudi royal family instead of whiny Alberta doctors.

/sarcasm

Hard to tell what to make of this. They are family practitioners? I’d say they will be hard to replace and I’m surprised anybody would want to do obstetrics out there these days - very tricky business.

In rural communities, Alberta Health will recruit generalists (general surgeons, general internal medicine specialists, etc.) to move to the community and open a private practice, and also spend a certain number of hours a week in the local hospital ER. Alberta Health will pay them for their ER time, and their private practice is their bread and butter income.

But Alberta Health walked out on negotiations between General Practitioners, and tore up the current contract that both parties use for billing the government insurance for Doctors services. Part of that is how Doctors who are not Government employees get paid for their time spent in hospital duty. So these private practitioners decide to spend more time on their practices and less in the ER.

Now some people it seems don't care that a rural community won't have enough Doctors to keep an ER running, because it doesn't affect them. The process to even recruit the current doctors was long and hard, and recruiting more will be difficult especially since there are already thriving private practices already. So rural communities suffer, and city folk don't care. This the Alberta Advantage(TM).

And the rural areas that have been the most loyal over the decades to the PCs, WRP, and now the UCP are the first ones to get shafted. Yet in three years they'll all overwhelmingly vote the gang back into power again. Can't help people if they're bound and determined to keep hurting themselves.

^^^

Funny, but back in the day Farmers and Ranchers were more NDP country. Then somehow they started swinging to the PCs, who ultimately abuse the Farmers and Ranchers.

I don't get it.

In rural communities, Alberta Health will recruit generalists (general surgeons, general internal medicine specialists, etc.) to move to the community and open a private practice, and also spend a certain number of hours a week in the local hospital ER. Alberta Health will pay them for their ER time, and their private practice is their bread and butter income.

But Alberta Health walked out on negotiations between General Practitioners, and tore up the current contract that both parties use for billing the government insurance for Doctors services. Part of that is how Doctors who are not Government employees get paid for their time spent in hospital duty. So these private practitioners decide to spend more time on their practices and less in the ER.

Now some people it seems don't care that a rural community won't have enough Doctors to keep an ER running, because it doesn't affect them. The process to even recruit the current doctors was long and hard, and recruiting more will be difficult especially since there are already thriving private practices already. So rural communities suffer, and city folk don't care. This the Alberta Advantage(TM).


This is a problem across Canada and government is only one part of it. If certain positions in a rural site are deemed necessary to fill, the compensation should be increased until they are filled and the resulting bill should be paid by reducing the fee rates and salaries in popular locations like Calgary and Edmonton.

Stop making sense!!!!

In rural communities, Alberta Health will recruit generalists (general surgeons, general internal medicine specialists, etc.) to move to the community and open a private practice, and also spend a certain number of hours a week in the local hospital ER. Alberta Health will pay them for their ER time, and their private practice is their bread and butter income.

But Alberta Health walked out on negotiations between General Practitioners, and tore up the current contract that both parties use for billing the government insurance for Doctors services. Part of that is how Doctors who are not Government employees get paid for their time spent in hospital duty. So these private practitioners decide to spend more time on their practices and less in the ER.

Now some people it seems don't care that a rural community won't have enough Doctors to keep an ER running, because it doesn't affect them. The process to even recruit the current doctors was long and hard, and recruiting more will be difficult especially since there are already thriving private practices already. So rural communities suffer, and city folk don't care. This the Alberta Advantage(TM).


This is a problem across Canada and government is only one part of it. If certain positions in a rural site are deemed necessary to fill, the compensation should be increased until they are filled and the resulting bill should be paid by reducing the fee rates and salaries in popular locations like Calgary and Edmonton.

That assumes Doctors are only in it for the money. Most who are, move to the US. The rest are more concerned about patient care. Fund the rural hospitals like the big city ones, and I bet you attract more doctors than by raising pay.

At the risk of boring everybody, this is the way I look at it and I should say that as a retired rural physician (from the other end of the country) I’m obviously biased on this. Unless you’re jumping out of a fire, few human actions are rarely motivated by one cause. Essentially, they are like resultant vectors with a fair few vectors going off in all directions summed together. I see medicine as something like a better paid version of the military. Although perhaps on average a bit tougher and more altruistic (myself excepted), doctors are basically like the rest of us and are motivated by much the same things. Money, location and conditions of work are key factors although Canadian trainees have been educated not to bring these up too much. Before I retired I used to interview medical graduates for a specialty training program and I much preferred foreigners like me because they would bluntly say refreshing things like, “I couldn’t get into the surgical residency program so I applied for this” instead of sweet nothings along these lines: “I’ve always admired this specialty and wish to practice eventually in the remotest location possible”.

Young people love the city - there’s lots to do and their friends are there. There’s a class factor too, especially for females, as cities offer more potential mates of the same status or higher than small towns do. Enough said on the psychosexual front. On conditions of work, the contrast is obvious in one crucial area - call. Large urban medical centres protect doctors better from excessive call which is the one thing that grinds even the most enthusiastic doctors down. What you see is call flight to such centres - ideally, getting into a one in four or better call schedule where you have residents and experts around you and are only responsible for a very specialized area that doesn’t require you to get up very often during the night. (I deliberately chose a specialty with very light call duties.) Contrast that with being an internist in outback Canada, sometimes doing 1 in 2 or even 1 in 1 call with no residents - often working all night and then doing your regular job all day, for days. These guys are physically wrecked after a week of that, and if anything goes wrong you’re judged by the same standards as your colleagues downtown. It’s no wonder we so often leave such jobs to the foreigners, sometimes with little experience. The successful rural centres are those that retain a critical mass of doctors, keeping call tolerable and avoiding a churn of new people coming through.

So given that location and conditions of work usually favour the city, we’ve got a decision to make. We can either fund rural hospital posts properly or centralize care and spend money on better patient transport. As medical budgets are going to to be tight for the foreseeable future, the money to keep rural doctors in place should come from the city. Just my two cents.