carmage

[Guest faqir9]

carms data for 2003 is up. Very ugly. Unmatch rates just under 10% (more than double last year). And those folks don't have much to look forward to....unmatch rates for prior year grads was almost 50%.

 

I am really just astonished that med students are not raising more of a stink about this.

[Guest UWOMED2005]

Yeah, it was an unusual. A number of factors combined to make this a particularly bad year.

[Guest faqir9]

Is there a single one of those factors that will get better, not worse, in the future?

[Guest UWOMED2005]

Most of them will get better in the future.

 

I think an unusual amount of (francophone) Quebec students joined the Match because of the garbage that was going on in Quebec under the Landry government. Hopefully with the Charest government that will change.

 

There were a few IMGs added to the first round for Manitoba. Word is they're restructuring the way IMGs interact with CaRMS so that might not be a problem in the future.

 

One thing that won't change is the fact Canadian citizens who did their MD in the US were no longer considered IMGs and were now considered for the first round. This was probably the other major cause for the 'carmage' this year.

 

One last thing: hopefully some more med students will start choosing Family medicine. Roughly half the spots are in family med, to have only 24% of students rank it is ridiculous. I say this not only for the sake of a decrease in the unmatched rate, but also because this country is getting desperately short on family docs. Of course half the issue is that they need to make family medicine more enticing to med students. . .

[Guest peachy]

What's the other half? Changing the application process so that family-doctor types are selected for?

[Guest faqir9]

it strikes me as though the added students from increased class sizes will more than offset that in the future.

[Guest UWOMED2005]

faqir9 - yes, there will be increased students in the future. But you can also bet their will be increased residency spots. Of course the real question is, will those spots be in areas of need (ie family medicine, arthroplastic surgery, etc.) or in areas that med students want to go into (ie ophtho, derm, ENT, plastics.)

 

Peachy - it's funny, the Liberal MLA candidates came to speak to us yesterday. For the most part, a fairly solid platform. They really slipped up when it came to residency positions though. Someone brought up the increase in student numbers and where residency program spots would be allocated, and their response was areas of need such as family. Of course, some of the people didn't like that response at all, as it could mean their favourite specialty is more competitive.

 

The problem is, we can't all be ophthalmologists (though cataract waiting lines are too long here,) plastic surgeons, or dematologists. Nor can all 74 of the students who applied for the one spot in optho here last year. The system is designed to have about 50% of physicians in family medicine, yet about half that (24%) are choosing family in the first round.

 

Something has to give. Personally, I think the number one change that has to be made is to make family medicine more enticing (ie change the billing fees, and maybe just throw all the med students, residents and specialists who denigrate family docs into family practice for a couple of years so they learn something about what they're talking about. ) as a carrot is better than a stick, particularly when that stick might chase people to other provinces or the US. But in the end, something has to give. Under the current system, most specialists are relatively useless without good family physicians to refer their patients to, unless the patients are arriving in the ER, in which case for some conditions it's already too late to do anything significant (ie a stroke after bilateral carotid artery stenosis.)

[Guest everyoneloveschem]

My mom is doing her PhD in health policy so there are always interesting medically related topics flying around our dinner table. She was saying that the gov't wants to get rid of GPs as they are and have nurse practitioners instead, with maybe one GP to manage like 10 staff. Which is all fine and dandy, but it certainly doesn't make me want to go into Family Medicine. I also work with doctors, and I get to hear their various complaints, like not getting paid to work up LUF forms, or paperwork. In fact on the doctors, who also works in the ER and nursing homes said that he makes 3x what he does as a GP doing the other work. Now I know that money isn't everything, but between a potentially risky job future and already lower salaries and the pain of it all, why would I want to do Family Medicine. The only thing I can see them doing is either paying a whole lot more for GPs, or making spots in universities that are for FM track students (like having the military fund you, you would be limited to FM). Its frustrating. I think FM would be great, but the more I work with GPs, the less confident I become that I would want to be one. :\

[Guest UWOMED2005]

I think one of the things they're going to have to do is increase the salary (or billing fees) for physicians. The liberal candidates I spoke to were talking about a tuition reimbursement incentive for med students who wanted to go into medicine. The number they suggested was 20%, which for a UWO student would amount to just over $11,000. Seeing as most of our debts will be well over $100,000, I'm not sure if that's a great enough incentive to convince many students to change careers.

 

Nurse practioners, eh? That discussion is a landmine. . . but I wouldn't worry about that. I doubt the government would really do that, if they did it would be the conservatives, and I don't think they'll be the government for too much longer.

[Guest mying]

Actually, the replacing GP (FP) with NP idea was an NDP platform a decade or so ago... so it's definitely not just the domain of the conservatives...

[Guest UWOMED2005]

Well, I'm surprised!