Medical school enrollment is too high

[rmorelan]

Medicine is special because according to the ON govt yesterday it costs them 780k to train a specialist to the end of residency. That's lots and lots of tax dollars. Every person who is unemployed or heads down south means a wasted 780k. That's wasted taxpayer dollars.

 

Second, your wrong that there is plenty of jobs for all in rurualareas areas. For so e specialties, there may be some unfilled spots. It's not enough to employ everyone. There is a reason the CMA, royal college and specialty associations are all looking at employment numbers. Itsnota simple everyone go rural issue like you are making it out to be.

 

and even if it was that simply the rural areas would fill up in rather short order. Not that such a think would be bad of course but it would be nice to actually have an overall plan

[deeman101]

Not everyone who enters medical school is content to do whatever part of medicine that currently has jobs in wherever it is. Furthermore applicants are not warned that this is the current state of the profession that they are, for all intents and purposes, irreversibly commiting themselves to. They don't feel entitled, they feel cheated that this was not made clear before they dedicated their best years and $$ to.

 

Also should one make the brave/stupid choice of actually pursuing a field in medicine with a next-to-nil job market in residency, you face many many pitfalls along the way.

 

1. You are trying to predict the job market 5+ years from now and hope you get it right.

 

2. If you get it wrong, you will likely end up doing a fellowship. This fellowship will make you sub specialized in a specialty which is good for being competitive....but only if someone has a job for that subspecialty...wherever it is.

 

3. You've committed yourself to maintaining debt status quo if not more debt (depending on if you had to travel for this fellowship....which you should...to americaland...where fellowships dont pay so well...).

 

4. If you went to americaland, you've went under a J1 student/work visa or H1B work visa. Which means once your fellowship is done you're coming back to Canada and hoping there are jobs advertised. Only a lot of times jobs are advertised really as a formality since they already had someone in mind. And that someone isn't you because you've been MIA in americaland for the past year or more. So now you've lost status in the states and you're coming back to canada scrambling for a locum anywhere.

 

5. Holy crap you're suddenly 35+ and still a temporary doctor / apprenticing doctor! What happened to family building and child rearing and stuff!

 

6. Who cares wtf ever you wanted to do. You should've just become a rural gp or something else non competitive and at least be employed somewhere/anywhere after more than a decade of school. Maybe its not too late to go back to being a r1 family resident....

 

 

I think of these things now as I reflect on my choice to apply only 1 field, which also notorious for its job situation. But I knew this is what I would do when I realized I was financially incapable of backing out of this profession in the 2nd month of 3rd year.

 

 

Tl;dr section:

So in summary the answer is the government hires more docs via cutting existing physician wages or just ponying up more money, or decrease the number of med students. I do not believe training more residents is the answer, there will just be even more newly minted specialists with no jobs. Unless that was their grand scheme to make more GPs, in which case they should just come out and say you will most likely end up a gp whether you like it or not should you choose to attend medical school.

 

Edit: although not every specialty looks like this. There are more fields with job issues than not. There are some fields *cough* surgery *cough* that are not even admitting that they have a job situation. They need to maintain the resident numbers to keep their services going while the staff toil away in the OR.

[HycrestJIT]

Medicine is special because according to the ON govt yesterday it costs them 780k to train a specialist to the end of residency. That's lots and lots of tax dollars. Every person who is unemployed or heads down south means a wasted 780k. That's wasted taxpayer dollars. You might like paying taxes but I certainly don't.

 

Second, you're wrong that there is plenty of jobs for all in rural areas areas. For some specialties, there may be some unfilled spots. It's not enough to employ everyone in every specialty. There is a reason the CMA, royal college and specialty associations are all looking at employment numbers. Its not a simple "everyone go rural" issue like you are making it out to be.

 

There aren't jobs for everyone in a rural place. A neurosurgeon has no work there for example (and I feel for those residents, because while the job outlook is poor, I hardly believe that a NSx residency program would cut the number of residents it trains each year - the NSx service would crater if that were the case). That's a really crappy catch-22.

 

But there are lots of jobs in rural/regional and community settings currently. And there are positions for specialties who are commonly thought to have no jobs. It's just that people don't want to go there for many reasons (most of them all very valid and understandable). But, a person can't claim that it's unfair to not have a job when one is indeed available, even if it's not the one a person would like. Compromise in life is not a bad thing.

 

Medicine is nice in that one can continue to train and earn money while doing so in order to make themselves more competitive for a job that they would like. But this in no way guarantees that job for that person. It comes down to pro and con decision making, and decisions have consequences. Sometimes that's hard.

 

*Sigh* I think more sleep in life would decrease the volatility of ranting.