Questions regarding where you can practice

[Guest med2006McGill]

"The Québec government requires that all students who are not Québec residents must agree in writing at the time of registration that if, upon completion of the four-year curriculum and post-graduate training, they wish to remain in the province they will practice for a defined period of time in one of the areas designated as medically underserved."

 

Do other provinces have policies like this? For instance, can a MD who is not trained at UBC pratice in downtown Vancouver? Also, just to make sure, an Ont resident who attends a med school outside of Ont (but elsewhere in Canada) will be able to pratice in Ont upon completion of residency training, right?

[Guest DrSahsi]

To my knowledge, there is no such geographic restriction to licensure in Ontario... though the thought is often bandied about as a potential "solution" to the underservicing of certain regions.

 

Quebec has some interesting ideas.

 

- Rupinder

[Guest Ian Wong]

Do other provinces have policies like this? For instance, can a MD who is not trained at UBC pratice in downtown Vancouver?

Yep. I think this is another medical practice quirk perhaps unique to Quebec.

 

A few years back, the BC government tried to do something very similar to what you've stated above. The way they planned to enforce it was to restrict the quantity of billing numbers available in the larger cities like Vancouver or Victoria. Therefore, not everyone who had recently finished a residency (in either BC or outside of BC), could be assured of an opportunity to practise in an urban center, but would instead have to go into the underserved, rural communities until a Vancouver/Victoria billing number became available.

 

An additional disincentive is that if you were a new graduate, and you did get a Vancouver/Victoria billing number, you were capped at getting 60% (or some other similar percentage) of the actual fee itself in your first year of practice (or something like that). In your second year of practice, that cap would be raised to 70% of the actual fee, and so on until five years had elapsed, at which time you'd finally be entitled to the same fee schedule that an already-established doctor would be using.

 

Again, that was supposed to dissuade new graduates from seeking jobs in the big cities because not only would you have a tough time just getting a billing number, but when you did, your fee-for-service payments would be lower because it was capped.

 

Luckily though, all this got shot down by the BC Provincial court on the grounds of being discriminatory. The bottom line being, you can perhaps lead people down a rural path via incentives, but trying to force them there doesn't hold. Except rural Quebec, where doctors, Emerg docs in particular, are open season for legislation, I guess.

 

Ian