While politicians tout the benefits of reducing interprovincial trade barriers to unlock prosperity amid escalating trade tensions, our most precious health-care resources — fully qualified doctors — remain shackled. Physicians face a maze of regulations when attempting to practise beyond their home province. We must break these chains.
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Authors:
- Anthony Sanfilippo - professor of Medicine (Cardiology), Queen’s University, Ontario
- Neil Seeman - Senior Fellow, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, and Adjunct Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
We must also demand more seats be opened so enough doctors can get trained.
It’s crazy that, on one hand, we have the Red Seal program, which allows tradespeople in certain trades to have their qualifications recognized across Canada, and on the other hand, we have nothing for any type of healthcare worker.
My last doctor before my current one (who I am literally lucky to have, getting on her roster was a complete fluke) was from BC and he said that the hoops he had to jump through to practice in ON were exhausting.
It’s not dissimilar for engineers either.
Either way, a national board to administer a national Act would be necessary, which would need to develop the national licencing requirements. Unfortunately, there’s not many doctors with extra time on their hands to aid with this task.
I was under the impression that we already have national licensing requirements. There’s just more on top that stops doctors from practicing in every province.
Surely there are at least 3 retired doctors from each province and territory who now primarily work as medical consultants, especially as it relates to politics. Surely Health Canada has the workforce and ability to arrange yet another panel/committee.
I don’t accept that this is difficult, it’s just costly and tedious.
Yep, I’d agree with that. I know engineering licensing is governed by each province with Engineers Canada enabling some parity in standards across the country to improve mobility.
These provincial licensing/priviledging difficulties indicate provinces still have a significant say in who can practice in their province. I would guess the national standards are more around education.
Canadians, this system is unequivocally fucking stupid. Signed, the rest of the world.
We know. It’s one of those things where a system was just allowed to sprout up without any thought being put into it, and now whenever someone tries to fix it, the vested interests howl like my cats do when you lift the sardines out of reach.
I agree but you’re going to have to fight each individual provincial doctors watching out for doctors, professional associations first before they will ever allow that to happen.
The licensing exam is the same Canada wide for all doctors of a same speciality. There are minor differences in the curriculum of a few disciplines but nothing big enough for the patients to worry. Then I suppose jobs will be given after an interview process and that process will remove MDs that can’t speak the language of the local population and favour those that have more thorough training.
In principle yes, but don’t forget language requirements. It can be dangerous to have unilingual healthcare workers serving a differently unilingual population. A unilingual anglophone in, say, Joliette Quebec might not be able to understand unilingual francophone patients.
Absolute nonsense - an English speaking doctor would be very successful in many Quebec communities, likewise a French speaking doctor would have a lot of success in many communities outside of Quebec. There’s also just as many non-English/French communities where this would be a “problem”. Regulating what language a doctor “must” speak would be just another wasteful bureaucratic hoop.
Oh yea? Have you ever been to a doctor that doesn’t speak your language at all? Would you trust the life of your kid to one?
Edit: let me pose the question differently. Let’s say I have a friend, a fantastic oncologist, but only speaks Arabic (native) and French (fluentish second language). Should my friend be allowed to practice in Barrie, Ontario? Or should he be required to learn English first?
He won’t get hired if he isn’t able to speak the language (whatever that might be for the region/clinic/hospital), it doesn’t need to be part of licensing.
Excuse me but that just dodging the question, or outsourcing the responsibility to tHE fReE mARkeT.
Let’s say he speaks really shitty basic English and there is a big need for his specialty and he’s hired with the assumption that it will get better…over time, maybe. Then YOU take your kid who you suspect might have something going on and are assigned to this doctor who barely speaks English. Your doctor can barely communicate with you the parent or the kid in English and you have to monkey around with chatgpt, google translate and hand gestures to explain what hurts, and at what situation. He comes back with some kind of response and then you have follow up questions, like is this invasive test necessary, can it be rescheduled, are there alternatives, what about that other drug the kid is taking and so on. And again, you have to do this with Google translate and chatgpt or whatever because the guys English is limited to “little girl test blood no needle, day tomorrow, no worry, if pain come back”.
Does this sound like hell to you? It does to me.
Now flip the script, and imagine you’re a francophone. That’s what I’m talking about.
This could be easily solved without stopping doctors from having mobility to the majority of Canada. Moreover, some regions have people who speak English or French poorly, if at all. The concerns you raise will almost always apply to them, so how many languages are you going to require doctors learn before they can practice? Or do you insist that all doctors just be bilingual? Is just French okay?
You could easily craft a federal law that requires any doctor to be licensed in a given region be fluent in the primary language of that region. Yes, that would limit doctors going in or out of Quebec (and other regions to a lesser degree). But how does stopping someone from being able to practice in both BC and Ontario without needless hurdles help or harm Quebec?
This whole thread started with me saying:
In principle yes, but don’t forget language requirements.
The rest of what I wrote is just trying to get people with dismissive attitudes towards my argument (“absolute nonsense”) to empathize with my point of view.
Now, your second paragraph basically operationalizes exactly what I’m talking about. We are in agreement.
