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can a rural community/small city support a cardiologist?


Guest copacetic

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Guest copacetic

hey one of the specialties im looking at (amoung many others) is cardiology. namely cardiac electrophysiology. the thing is that i am also interested in smaller community medicine. away from big cities, and major metropololitan areas comparable in size to toronto/vancouver/ottawa etc. what kind of population size is necessary to support the work of a cardiologist? any guesstimations? i also figure that if a specialist is working in a more rural community/smaller city they would be on call more often is that the case?

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Guest copacetic
Some smaller centres do have cardiologists (ie. Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Kelowna). When you get much smaller than that, you don't have the population base to support cardiology. In these very small centres, cardio patients are managed by internists or family docs and transferred to a bigger centre if they are too complex or need intervention.

 

If you decide to become an electrophysiologist, you will (unfortunately) be confined to major centres in Canada.

 

A possible way to balance cardiology and rural medicine is to visit remote areas every few months to hold clinics. I know a few specialists who do this... some even fly into communities in the far north with their own echo machine/echo tech!

 

Another possibility is to take some time off from your cardiology career in the city to do locums as a rural internist. This is fun while you're in training, but once you are a full fledged practicing cardiologist, it might not be so fun (or lucerative).

 

thanks ffp! flying north a couple times a year sounds kinda interesting! from the cities you mentioned it seems the population size that seems to be reasonable is 110K plus or so (as a rough guesstimation)

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Well...depending on how rural you want to be...you can work outside of big cities. For example, I know there are cardiologists in Durham region outside TO. So Whitby, Oshawa, Pickering. I don`t know if there are any as far as say, Port Perry. But if you want a more rural life, you can always live somewhere like Port Perry and then drive to Whitby for work...it's like 30 min or less.

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Well...depending on how rural you want to be...you can work outside of big cities. For example, I know there are cardiologists in Durham region outside TO. So Whitby, Oshawa, Pickering. I don`t know if there are any as far as say, Port Perry. But if you want a more rural life, you can always live somewhere like Port Perry and then drive to Whitby for work...it's like 30 min or less.

 

I wouldn't say Durham region is rural...

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Guest copacetic

im thinking that when all is said and done, id like to live in the york region/stouffville region of the greater toronto area. it offers a good mix of semi-rural life (there are tons of farms in stouffville) and city life. toronto is like 40 minutes away. would an area like that support a cardiologists day to day activities? like EP that is.

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hey one of the specialties im looking at (amoung many others) is cardiology. namely cardiac electrophysiology. the thing is that i am also interested in smaller community medicine. away from big cities, and major metropololitan areas comparable in size to toronto/vancouver/ottawa etc. what kind of population size is necessary to support the work of a cardiologist? any guesstimations? i also figure that if a specialist is working in a more rural community/smaller city they would be on call more often is that the case?

 

I know that this probably won't help you much, but I want to do the exact same thing. I thought I was the only one until now. :D

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