Can't find a family doctor in Alberta? Training more medical students is not the silver bullet
CBC
This opinion piece is by Lauren Eastman and Samantha Horvey, family physicians and assistant professors in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Alberta. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.
For those one-in-four Albertans who do not have a family doctor, the recent news that the province will create 120 new medical school seats in the next three years sounds like a welcome solution to a struggling health-care system.
While the increase is much needed, the realities of solving the family medicine crisis are more complex.
To understand why increasing medical student spots may not lead to all Albertans having a family physician, it is important to understand the process of becoming a family doctor.
All medical doctors typically complete at least an undergraduate degree (which usually takes four years), then three or four years in medical school.
At the end of medical school, medical students apply to a residency program to choose their specialty, such as orthopedics, obstetrics or family medicine.
After an application and interview process, medical students are able to rank their residency programs of choice and similarly residency programs rank medical students in the order they would like to have them.
Based on the algorithm, medical students cannot be matched into a residency position they do not rank.
This is a Canada-wide matching system called the Canadian Residency Matching System (CaRMS).
In Alberta, the number of students choosing family medicine is declining.
In the CaRMS 2022 first-round match, 30 per cent of University of Alberta students matched to family medicine.
A sobering statistic is that the family medicine residency training programs at the University of Alberta and the University of Calgary had 42 empty family medicine residency training spots.
Overall, the University of Alberta has seen a downward trend in students matching to family medicine over the past three years — based on data from 2020, 2021 and 2022 — reaching 21 spots unfilled after the first round of matching this year.
This is despite having one of the best training programs in the country.
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