What can P.E.I. do to recruit more doctors?
CBC
It's been just over a month since the latest Prince Edward Island doctor informed patients he was closing down shop.
Dr. Hal McRae said in a Feb. 7 letter that he would cease practising at his Summerside office, potentially leaving thousands of people without a family doctor by the end of April.
P.E.I. lost more family doctors than it gained in 2022, with 11 resigning or retiring and only nine new ones signing up for a full-time position, according to the province. When you include specialists, though, the Island saw a net gain of 10 physicians last year.
But the trend may be more alarming than those numbers suggest, as experts say individual family physicians are seeing fewer patients these days.
So how does the provincial government go about hiring and retaining enough doctors to meet the Island's demand for health-care services?
One possible solution is looking at where future physicians are trained.
Most graduates in family medicine stay and work in the province where they went to med school, with larger provinces like Ontario, Quebec and B.C. retaining over 80 per cent of their medical graduates, according to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
P.E.I. doesn't have its own faculty of medicine, but that's set to change. A joint degree program between the University of Prince Edward Island and Memorial University in St. John's, N.L. is set to begin taking in students at UPEI's campus in Charlottetown in 2025. It was originally expected to open this fall, but that has since been delayed twice — most recently in February.
Currently, there are only five available residency seats in P.E.I. through Halifax-based Dalhousie's Faculty of Medicine. That means five spots for new graduates to continue learning as they work with a supervising doctor or specialist in the field they want to pursue.
UPEI and Memorial have said they would like to see that increase to 20 seats over the next eight years as students start to graduate from their new medical program.
Dr. Krista Cassell, president of the Medical Association of P.E.I., said that on average, four out of the five people who take up residency seats here end up staying on the Island.
"We see a lot of value in that program because that's actually been proven in P.E.I. to be a very good recruitment tool," she said.
Cassell said the new UPEI medical school's planned focus on family medicine will be an asset, at a time when fewer students are looking to go into that area of medicine. The university hopes half of its students will become generalists and the other half specialists.
But expanding the number of residency seats comes with its own complications, she said, not the least of which is whether the system has the capacity to train them all.