Canada

It’s probably not the best approach. We are struggggggling to get primary care providers, at least in the US, and I suspect in Canada as well.

Family medicine is not the same as say a neurosurgery residency. It’s a lot of understanding vaccination schedules and identifying and treating things like high blood pressure or high blood sugar before they become chronic issues.

But there’s limits to what a pcp is going to manage and the complex issues are going to get punted to specialists. The problem is we don’t have enough pcps to go around and so you have this huge barrier to care because people don’t have doctors they can go see to then get referred to specialists with 3 4 and 5 year residencies that allow them to handle the complex stuff.

Honestly for the doctor that’s gone through 4 years of medical school, while it would be great if we extended their training and made them even better educated, we also need to balance that with removing barriers that might prevent docs from choosing family medicine as their speciality.

I’d rather someone have access to a doctor with 2 years of training than having access to no doctor because they can’t convince the new grad MDs to take an extended family medicine residency because it pays a fraction of what an orthopedic surgery specialty will pay.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It wants the college to consider "the potential difficulties that a 36-month training program may pose for students, especially in the context of the current nationwide primary care crisis," according to a statement.

At a time when one in five Canadians don't have a family doctor, provincial health ministers are also opposed to mandatory longer training.

Health Minister Adrian Dix told reporters that he and his provincial counterparts "put it in the statement unanimously that residency requirements should stay at two years."

The college said it has consulted established family doctors, medical schools, students and residents, and studied programs in other countries.

One calls on the college to "immediately cease the implementation of the third year in family practice program," establish an independent review committee to present recommendations, then decide what to do, based on evidence.

"I feel like we should have a say in this as well, and it's really surprising to me that we don't get to have that vote at all, especially residents and first year medical students," Verma told him in a recent Zoom call.

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