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.
See articles for full details
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
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:
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.