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No, You Can’t Be a Doctor Here

I wrote my political platform the other day, with Health being one of my ten planks. One of the problems with Health is that it’s in provincial jurisdiction, so my federal platform would have difficulty really affecting health here in Quebec.

This province has the lowest rate of citizen access to family doctors, which you would think would be a priority problem for the government. It’s not. Having access to family doctors is the best way to keep healthcare costs down, by providing true preventative medicine that catches problems before they spiral out of control. Having health issues dealt with in the Emergency is the most expensive way to run a health system. (I suspect the government has a better economic equation: just letting people die is the cheapest course of action).

Why do we have so few family doctors in Quebec? Here’s one reason:

Medical students from out-of-province are REQUIRED to sign an agreement saying that they will leave Quebec after their residency. If they choose to stay, they must pay a significant fine.

So one of the reasons that we have a lack of doctors is that doctors who have gone to medical school in Quebec, and trained in Quebec medical residency programs, all at taxpayer expense, but come from other provinces are REQUIRED to leave when they are done their training in Quebec.

Make sense?

2 Comments

  1. Fred Fred 2008-10-21

    Insanity.

  2. Dan Parsons Dan Parsons 2008-10-21

    No, it doesn’t make any damn sense at all. Why do they do this? This is particularly troubling for someone like me who is planning on moving to Montreal at some point.

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