For the third year in a row, there was a decrease in the number of medical students seeking residency with family physicians, according to the Ontario Medical Association (OMA).
“The OMA is concerned about the declining number of medical students choosing family medicine,” OMA President Dr. Andrew Park told reporters Tuesday.
According to the OMA, the number of students seeking fields outside of family medicine is a growing problem.
“After the first round of this year’s competition, there were 108 vacant family medicine positions out of a total of 560 in Ontario, up from 100 unclaimed positions last year,” Park said.
“That’s a sharp increase from 61 and 2022, 52 and 2021 and 30 and 2020.”
Park said the second round of registrations will be announced on Thursday and that his organization will follow them closely.
The OMA brought together a group of educators from Ontario medical schools in an effort to explain some of the reasons why students choose other fields of medicine to practice and what some possible solutions might be.
The group speaking on behalf of the OMA on Tuesday included Dr. Cathy Risdon of McMaster University, Dr. Gena Piliotis of Queen’s University, Dr. Azadeh Moaveni of the University of Toronto and Dr. Jobin Varughese of the Metropolitan University of Toronto.
While a number of issues they discussed were financial, the doctors gathered said there were other factors that also needed to be addressed, including formularies.
“No one goes to medical school to fill out forms,” Park said. “Doctors want to care for their patients, but the administrative work that comes into medicine makes the field focus less on caring for people and more on paperwork.”
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Moaveni said that, on average, GPs spent 19 hours a week on administrative tasks, depending on how many patients they saw.
“I’ve had the same practice since I was a resident. I will tell you that that administrative burden has skyrocketed,” she explained, noting that doctors have to fill out forms for insurance companies or approve a rehabilitation course for a patient who may have had a bad fall.
“We have too many forms that family physicians don’t need to sign or, if they do, they are extraordinarily too cumbersome so they can focus on patient care instead of filling out these massive forms,” Park said.
He did not deny the importance of some of the forms, but said they should be simplified, if not eliminated.
“The thing is, some of these forms either don’t need them, or they’re too long, or they need to be revised, and all of those things should be on the table,” he said.
The entire group said one of the most important issues Ontario needs to address is creating time and space for current family physicians to train the next generation, whether in the classroom or in the field.
Piliotis said Queen’s has launched a new program in Oshawa dedicated to educating family physicians.
He said schools should be able to introduce family doctors to students at an earlier stage in their careers in an effort to encourage future generations that this should be their focus.
“It’s difficult to have clinical teaching,” Piliotis said. “There is not enough support for our clinical teachers in the community, let alone getting them to come in and actually teach in the classroom and leave their very busy, tight offices to do so.”
Metropolitan University of Toronto will open a new medical school in Brampton in 2025, which aims to allocate 60 per cent of its resources to family medicine, according to Varughese.
He said students at the school will have trouble finding places to learn their trade if the government does not increase pay for current doctors to train new ones.
“Currently, we are in a situation where a family doctor who provides community clinical education is asked to accept students into their space, where they may or may not have additional rooms for that student, and this is done in a way that the compensation basically amounts to about $25 for half a day,” he explained.
Additionally, there is also the issue of the number of doctors retiring or focusing their practice, according to Risdon.
“They have trained hundreds of students to be future family physicians, and those students will care for thousands and thousands of patients in their lifetime,” he said.
“So every medical professor we lose is actually a loss of important future and potentially a loss of capacity.”
Park said 2.3 million people no longer have a family doctor in Ontario, a number that is “expected to nearly double in just two years.”
Doctors say by spending more on primary care, the province will save money in the future as patients will be able to address problems sooner rather than later when they get worse.
“The health care of all Ontarians, both in and out of the hospital, will be affected,” Risdon said. “So this is a critical issue that we all need to pay attention to.”
Global News has contacted the Ministry of Health for comment on the doctor’s comments. They did not respond with comment by press time.
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