Alberta or Ontario

[Doctordebo]

Hi guys, I am a general practitioner in the UK, looking to move to Canada, the two provinces on my mind are Alberta and Ontario, the attraction for Ontario is the FHO,FHG available there with the provision 8 week annual leave as well. And one still get paid if you're on leave.

Alberta on the other hand offers the fee for service model, do the Alberta doctors make so much that when they go on annual leave, they can afford not to earn during the annual leave??, and still pay overhead 

What are the pro and cons of working in Alberta?????

 

[frenchpress]

On 3/5/2023 at 3:22 PM, Doctordebo said:

Hi guys, I am a general practitioner in the UK, looking to move to Canada, the two provinces on my mind are Alberta and Ontario, the attraction for Ontario is the FHO,FHG available there with the provision 8 week annual leave as well. And one still get paid if you're on leave.

Alberta on the other hand offers the fee for service model, do the Alberta doctors make so much that when they go on annual leave, they can afford not to earn during the annual leave??, and still pay overhead 

What are the pro and cons of working in Alberta?????

 

I don’t know how much Ontario makes ffs, but you can compare to the below information about Alberta. 

The general impression among family docs in AB is that it has been one of the best paid provinces to work in family medicine for a long time, at least until recently (as the BC government just released a new model that most people think is better and seems to pay more). This is primarily because of 1) time modifiers for billing that allow you to bill extra for patient appointments where time spent is > 14 mins and includes same day time spend on indirect care (charting, labs, consult letters, etc), such that you can make a reasonable amount just seeing 3-4 patients per hour, and 2) low cost of living, and therefore lower cost of overhead and more money in your pocket. A doc seeing 4 patients per hour (15 minute appointments) and billing a single modifier on every one, will make ~ $225 / hr (I’d need to double check this exactly). 

Other pros: single database province wide for all inpatient and outpatient lab results, imaging, etc, dating back to the early 2000s. (Contrasted with Ontario, where a patient in one hospital can get transferred a few blocks away to the trauma center and need to have all their imaging repeated because the hospitals are on different EMRs). And Alberta is currently (and nearly done) implementing a single EMR for all hospital sites (and some AHS based and clinic based outpatient services as well). Actually quite reasonable access to a lot of outpatient services (e.g. compared to BC I have found that Alberta, at least in urban centres, is the land of milk and honey when it comes to accessing outpatient radiology services like pain management, msk ultrasound, dermatologists,  etc). Alberta also has a lot of funding into primary care networks (PCNs), which can provide quite a lot of support for multidisciplinary services in your own clinic when you’re attached to a well run one. And reasonably low (but not the lowest) provincial taxes.

Cons: the weather sucks, and the average politics tend to range from extremely to very conservative outside of the urban centres, and very conservative to moderate in places like Edmonton and Calgary, with only a few pockets of left-winged refuge for us snowflake socialist millennials.

Also, to your question about leave. Most family docs I know take quite a bit of vacation. But they don’t just go on leave and keep paying overhead. You’re expected to find coverage for your patients while you are away, so typically you would get a locum, and they will cover all / portion of the overhead while you are away. Some people struggle to find locums, but often that’s because they offer a bad deal or work in a poorly run clinic. If you attach yourself to the right clinic you won’t have too many issues.

[frenchpress]

And to add on to my previously post… Honestly, I think practicing family medicine in Alberta is often pretty great. But I cannot emphasize enough how much I hate winter here, where the snow not uncommonly starts as early as September and can go as late as May. Rarely it snows in June. And even very rarely in July or August. And when there isn’t snow and frost in the spring and summer to destroy your garden, it just randomly storms and crushes everything with hail instead. Today the high was ~ -10C, and that’s a huge improvement on earlier this week. 

[Doctordebo]

10 hours ago, frenchpress said:

I don’t know how much Ontario makes ffs, but you can compare to the below information about Alberta. 

The general impression among family docs in AB is that it has been one of the best paid provinces to work in family medicine for a long time, at least until recently (as the BC government just released a new model that most people think is better and seems to pay more). This is primarily because of 1) time modifiers for billing that allow you to bill extra for patient appointments where time spent is > 14 mins and includes same day time spend on indirect care (charting, labs, consult letters, etc), such that you can make a reasonable amount just seeing 3-4 patients per hour, and 2) low cost of living, and therefore lower cost of overhead and more money in your pocket. A doc seeing 4 patients per hour (15 minute appointments) and billing a single modifier on every one, will make ~ $225 / hr (I’d need to double check this exactly). 

Other pros: single database province wide for all inpatient and outpatient lab results, imaging, etc, dating back to the early 2000s. (Contrasted with Ontario, where a patient in one hospital can get transferred a few blocks away to the trauma center and need to have all their imaging repeated because the hospitals are on different EMRs). And Alberta is currently (and nearly done) implementing a single EMR for all hospital sites (and some AHS based and clinic based outpatient services as well). Actually quite reasonable access to a lot of outpatient services (e.g. compared to BC I have found that Alberta, at least in urban centres, is the land of milk and honey when it comes to accessing outpatient radiology services like pain management, msk ultrasound, dermatologists,  etc). Alberta also has a lot of funding into primary care networks (PCNs), which can provide quite a lot of support for multidisciplinary services in your own clinic when you’re attached to a well run one. And reasonably low (but not the lowest) provincial taxes.

Cons: the weather sucks, and the average politics tend to range from extremely to very conservative outside of the urban centres, and very conservative to moderate in places like Edmonton and Calgary, with only a few pockets of left-winged refuge for us snowflake socialist millennials.

Also, to your question about leave. Most family docs I know take quite a bit of vacation. But they don’t just go on leave and keep paying overhead. You’re expected to find coverage for your patients while you are away, so typically you would get a locum, and they will cover all / portion of the overhead while you are away. Some people struggle to find locums, but often that’s because they offer a bad deal or work in a poorly run clinic. If you attach yourself to the right clinic you won’t have too many issues.

Many thanks, quite informative especially with the fact that the province has got a single database EMR and the low cost of living, much appreciated!