So are family doctors making more by the hour than a lot of specialists/surgeons?

[Real Beef]

The career profiles starting on page 145 of the RBC career profiles is a nice resource. Sure the sample size is not representative however it gives a nice snapshot of what some careers look like. Lots of internal med subspecialties in the 60-80 hr range.

 

http://www.med.uottawa.ca/Students/careerplanning/assets/documents/Canadian_Medical_Residency_Guide.pdf

 

Beef

[futureGP]

cardiologists indeed do work hard, and if you're IC doing PCIs, you will be working long hours and on-call would be hard with all the MIs coming through

 

but you'll probably be able to clear anywhere between 500k-800k

 

but if you're just an out-patient cardiologist on a private clinic, you can set whatever hours you want, but you'll still be on-call at a near hospital if you want some hospital privileges (probably not as hard as interventional cardiologists) and you will gross somewhere between $250-400k mid-career

 

--- but the thing with specialist out-clinic is you need to slowly build-up your clientele and have to rely on either 1. working at a hospital full-time and so much better access to patients from ER consults 2. work at a private clinic which may take sometime for you to build up your patients

 

and i think this applies to every internal subspecialist/specialty out-patient clinic

 

e.g. a recent grad neurologist once said that until he could have enough patients on his list for him to open up a clinic on his own, he had to work in a group practice where he also had to take call for a local hospital so lifestyle was not so great + all the politics associated with being at a hospital

 

 

surgeons generally tend to make more than other specialists (internal, family, psych, peds) and that's merely because they do more procedures as a part of their practice, but no matter where you practice (in hospital or private clinic outside) you will always have to take call since you need OR time/hospital privileges to give your service with all the associated personnel (anesthesia support, nurses etc etc)

 

there is a reason why ROAD is a ROAD -- its because there's good lifestyle/good pay associated with them

 

but like rmorelan has recently said, radiology isn't all so lifestyle apparently esp. with the advancement of interventional radiology and people needing access to radiology service asap

 

 

from lifestyle/$$$ point of view, anesthesia would prob be one of the best -- but still comes with a life-time of taking call and with more anesthesiologists taking on intensive care/perioperative care aspects of medicine, many anesthesiologists typically don't do just intraoperative anesthesiology

 

 

so then here comes an argument for whether family doctors make more by the hour than other specialties,

 

$20-30 visits each lasting from ~5-15 mins depending on the case. As you build more relationship about each patient, you know more about their history so it's merely filling in the gap -- and could take <5 mins

 

with EMR, every specialty gains in terms of efficiency if you do it right -- but FM may benefit the most esp. if there is easy access to their previous chart through a unified health care information system across a region

 

per hour could be anywhere from $120 to $200 and this is a bit less than many other specialties (E.g. ~$200-250 for emerg, $200-400 if your anesthetist doing procedures -- i'm just throwing estimates here).

 

 

the good thing about FM is there is so much demand so that if you are willing, you could literally work 80 hours a week doing your own full-time practice + walk-ins + locums + private procedures etc etc and earn $500-$1mill a year ($200*80*50 -- 2 week vacation/year = 800k)

 

or you could work 35-40 hours a week take 4 week vacations a year for ~$250-300k gross

 

 

and FM billing quotes tend to be lower because people who go into family tend to enjoy the lifestyle that comes with family and want to work a reasonable # of hours, or are satisfied working part-time, semi-part-time (e.g. my family doctor takes wednesdays off to golf)

 

 

bottomline: family doctors probably don't make more $$$/hr than specialist/surgeons. It's literally not possible according to our current fee schedule (unless you fit in 15-20 patients an hour which would be like $300-400).

 

But FM has the flexibility to expand or shrink their practice as much as they want because of the huge demand for a FD and family doctors being the doorstep to our health care system.

Whereas a surgeon cannot get all the OR times, subspecialists are limited by the # of clients who are willing to see them -- since many require referrals (Although in Canada demand is still probably higher because of the health care 'cartel')

 

 

lawyers charge $200-400/hr, but you don't see many of them earning $400k-500k that they should if they worked 40hrs a week/48weeks a year. They charge high but they compete for clients. This is sort of like the same for dentists who charge a lot but compete for clients.

This is how surgeons/specialists are, although demand is still very high in Canada due to the health care cartel

[A-Stark]

Yeah, I wouldn't underestimate the number of hours lawyers work, even at the most senior levels, in corporate work. I stayed with some family friends on elective, both of whom were Bay St types, one who had moved into something more consultative and the other who was a partner at a Big Firm. They had a full-time housekeeper/nanny who made dinner *every* night and the one who was a partner stayed up close to all night occasionally.

[futureGP]

Yeah, I wouldn't underestimate the number of hours lawyers work, even at the most senior levels, in corporate work. I stayed with some family friends on elective, both of whom were Bay St types, one who had moved into something more consultative and the other who was a partner at a Big Firm. They had a full-time housekeeper/nanny who made dinner *every* night and the one who was a partner stayed up close to all night occasionally.

 

Bay st is a totally different world lol

 

i agree with you, they work HARD

 

the big firms in Toronto are def very hard,

 

but not many get to work with them (quite lucrative too indeed) so you're looking at a quite marginalized # of lawyers