Building medical school about more than classrooms, cautions Health P.E.I. CEO
CBC
P.E.I. is going to need more doctors, and different types of doctors, as it prepares to open a medical school, says Health P.E.I. CEO Dr. Michael Gardam.
Medical students need more than just classrooms, said Gardam. They need to spend time in clinical settings with doctors treating actual patients, and that is not something the P.E.I. medical system is currently ready for.
"That's work that we have to do over the coming months, is to really figure out what's the gap between where we are now and what do we really need," said Gardam.
For starters, the province is going to have to change its recruitment strategy. Currently, its only concern in recruiting family doctors is taking Islanders off the patient registry. This has, in itself, been a problem. The number of Islanders on the registry recently passed 20,000. According to Statistics Canada, the percentage of Islanders without a family doctor grew from 11.3 per cent in 2015 to 14.9 per cent in 2019.
"The biggest concern is that we need, not only more doctors, but doctors who have a real interest and expertise in training new doctors," said Gardam.
Doctors who are training students will not be able to take on as many patients.
"When you involve medical students in a system, it slows everything down, and that's because we are busy teaching them and explaining what's going on," he said.