OTTAWA – The medical profession, provincial governments and rural Canada need a better game plan to attract physicians to rural communities, said a doctor who headed a physicians’ task force on future needs for medical staff.
“There is a problem in attracting doctors to rural areas,” Dr. Michael Howcroft of Toronto said in an interview. “We need to be a little more innovative.”
That could include incentives offered by provinces, efforts by rural communities to provide resident doctors more support and help, and more education for medical students about the special conditions of rural practice.
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A system of rotating medical staff into rural areas to give local doctors a break also could be considered.
“We have to develop strategies together,” he said. “In physician resource planning, we want to bring all the stakeholders to the table to address the problem.”
The problem, the task force reported last month, is that too few Canadian-trained physicians want the workload, isolation and lack of professional support common in rural areas.
“There often are not the back-up resources, the professional support,” said Howcroft. “We often hear that rural physicians have a hard time getting out of town because there is no one to replace them. Burnout is a big risk.”
As well, doctors with spouses who want to work often are reluctant to move to rural areas where job prospects are bleak.
Financial incentives offered by some provinces and communities to attract doctors to rural posts may succeed in getting them there but rarely keep them, he said.
And proposals to force graduating medical students to put in some time in rural Canada undermine a physician’s freedom of choice, said Howcroft.
Provinces like Saskatchewan have a problem keeping doctors. Between 1990 and 1993, Saskatche-wan recorded a net loss of 52 physicians, according to the task force report that was more than a year in the making.
“The provision of equitable access to medical services for the population living in rural and remote communities remains an ongoing issue,” according to the report. “The challenge is to encourage more physicians to locate their practices in such communities for reasonable periods of time and discourage further increases in larger communities that have relative oversupply.”
Some provinces have tried to overcome the reluctance of Canadian medical graduates to move out of the larger cities by hiring foreign doctors who are willing to live in rural areas as a ticket into Canada.
In Saskatchewan, more than half the practicing doctors received their training in other countries.
Howcroft said the goal should be to encourage more domestically trained physicians to serve rural areas.
