Snowmen

I remember doing the calculation a few years ago. When you add in their benefits, NPs earn about 90$/hour in Quebec whereas an FP earns about 105$/hour once you remove expenses. When you consider that FPs see more patients per hour and more complicated cases... Yeah. And let's not even mention the downstream costs.

I think we both know that answer to that question. NPs have a use in very limited scopes in my opinion. The two main ones I see are: 1) Follow-up for hospitalized surgical patients (since care by an NP is much better than the generally subpar/inexistant follow-ups these patients usually get from their surgeon, which is something research at my center has proven). 2) Primary care in communities too small to warrant an MD. Otherwise, they're more expensive than MDs in the long run and see fewer, less complex patients. What a fantastic deal!

Exact. After accepting an admission offer in Quebec, you're not allowed to apply for the following five years. I would hope other provinces would have similar rules.

Exactly. You could work about a fourth to a third of the year in Canada and earn the same. I'd rather live in Italy for 39 weeks/year while on vacation than 52 weeks/year while working.

Which is an awful use of limited financial ressources and a bad thing for us in the long term because "physicians billing 200$ to see a patient for 10 minutes" is a catchy headline to promote paycuts. Also, some of them are just awful and still eat up a ton of time. For instance, during rheumatology clinic, I had 3 referrals from the same FP in the same day and none of them were even close to being rheumatological (ankylosing spondylitis at 74, PMR with a normal CRP/ESR and suspected rheumatoid arthritis for distal interphalangeal joint pain...) and wouldn't have been sent by someone with

That has nothing to do with the hours worked, though. As you mentioned, the problem with urban family medicine programs is the pyramid. What you want is a rural program where you're gonna work a lot to get maximal exposure. As mentioned by jb24, your residency is only 2 years in family medicine and even with the most rigorous program, you won't learn everything. What you're looking for is a program that's the gonna make the proportion of things you don't know as small as possible and chill programs won't give you that. Once you're an attending, there's no one to catch the things you miss

You get to scam people and not go to jail. I guess that must be "good job prospects" for some people. You can even lead them to kill themselves, if you're into that kind of thing.

This. If you're a radiologist, you need to know the anatomy on the tip of your fingers and you need to understand what the people asking for imaging are looking for, and surgeons ask for a ton of imaging.

Quebec does offer both paths and students from both paths end up doing just fine.

For joint injections, family doctors will typically do the easy ones themselves (knees and the likes) while the harder ones require ultrasound or fluoroscopic guidance so that's pretty much only accessible to radiologists, PM&R or anesthesia (rheumatology too but they tend to keep it in house, i.e. the group has one rheumatologist that's trained in US and does the US-guided injections for everyone in the group). All in all, there isn't a huge market for doing specialty injection clinics since the aforementioned specialties will hog these procedures because they can bill a consultation on t

I wouldn't consider ophthalmology and ENT to be 100% surgical specialties in the sense that they also do a lot of clinic and conservative treatment compared to "classic" surgical specialties. As mentioned, if you're interested in cardiac surgery because of the big cases, ophthalmology won't cut it and ENT probably won't either. What's for sure is that the lifestyle in those specialties (as well as plastic surgery) is MUCH better than the lifestyle in cardiac surgery (but it's still surgery). And, as mentioned, ignore @offmychestplease since he's on a crusade to prove that all specialties

If you think there are a lot of appendicectomies, wait until you see how many cholecystectomies they do... It's easily half the cases if you're not a subspecialty surgeon.

I guess it does lead to some great exposure...

Yeah, easy to say before you've done your first overnight call shift, or your taken your first block of medical school for that matter. Or before you've had all responsibility dumped upon you by one of these professionals. Not only do doctors work more hours and study longer, they also get no benefit and mediocre work conditions. To make it even better, they're the ones who typically end up being responsible for everything that happens and that alone deserves the salary. Sure, making a quick "easy" consult sometimes feels like it's overpaid but every single time you decide the patient doe

The only time I've heard of a resident being fired was a FM resident at my university who got blackout drunk during a call shift to the point that the nurses got him to the ER and they ran a stroke code. Even that guy eventually managed to get his job back, which is somewhat worrying.