COVID-19 and Med School Classes

[SoftTings]

Do you guys think it is possible that in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, medical schools accept larger class sizes this year? The shortage of healthcare workers is more evident than ever.

I ask because I know that McGill's waitlist movement has been extraordinarily fast this year, and it is doubtful that many people have declined invites since they would not have heard from other schools yet. It appears as though McGill is accepting more students than usual, and I am curious if this could also be the case in Ontario schools

[MedicineLCS]

No, it doesn't really make sense. 

The absolute fastest someone can go through the entire training pipeline to primary care is 5 years (3 year school+2 FM years). Even if you argue that a 3 year school MS3 is a useful healthcare worker that's still well beyond even the most long-term estimate for this I've seen. The easiest way to deal with a shortage of healthcare workers is to relax licensing requirements, push MS4s ahead of schedule, and get residents out of their residencies. While provinces (And the States) are doing some of these things, they are currently bottle necking residents behind exams, which is a far more useful source of workers. 

In any case, this doesn't solve the issue that adding school seats doesn't do anything without an increase in residencies. This will (With some luck) be over in a couple of months, and when you consider the length of the training pipeline and costs involved it doesn't make sense as a first line response. Governments are going to be cash short, and training medical students is expensive, as are residencies. 

What I think may happen is different waitlist/offer acceptance behavior. We're going into a nasty economic depression, and I have encountered a few people who declined Medicine acceptances entirely for other, less stable, fields. Those kinds of people may be more reluctant to do so this year. On the flip side, there may be people who see physicians and healthcare workers dying overseas and may be second-guessing themselves now. In any case, these are likely very small groups, so we'll see in May, but I doubt there are major changes so long as all the schools release offers on schedule. 

[DrOzuma]

Hmmmm isn’t most of the problems we are facing right now bc of covid 19 more of a resource problem? I hear that we are running out of masks and ventilators everyday and that’s what’s hurting our response. Physicians are choosing between who lives and who dies because of the ventilator shortage. I do agree that in general we do have a lack of physicians (esp in some parts of ontario), but I think this pandemic is more straining on our resources than anything else.

[takasugi]

So are they going to be graduating more nurses as well? And other health professionals?

Also, there's not really a shortage of doctors... there's a problem with how they are distributed in Canada.

And if we wanted to quickly increase the # of healthcare workers to deal with this pandemic, reducing barriers for international med students would be faster and cheaper...