Has Canada always had a doctor shortage?

[nec209]

I hear about long wait times in the ER and long wait times to find a doctor where by people have to go to the ER or medical clinic do to they cannot find a doctor or long wait time.And the ER is very busy.

 

The only thing I can dig up on this topic is this.

 

Severe doctors' shortage predicted in Canada.

http://www.caribbeanmedicine.com/article7.htm

 

I hear the UK is worse than Canada.

[PhDP]

No, it's relatively recent.

[cypress]

Coincides with their escalating problems with the universal healthcare program.

[CharonY]

Actually it is a problem that has been growing for quite a while. Reports early as the late nineties have hinted at a potential shortage. There are a number of reasons that have been explored in various details in different studies. The most often named factors include insufficient enrollments into medical schools, loss of physicians to the US and reluctance to hire foreign physicians.

Further factors are that many physicians are reluctant to server rural areas and lack of certain specialists.

[nec209]

Well the only other thing I can find on it is.

 

Canada's shortage of doctors to worsen: study

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20030319/doctor_shortage030319?s_name=&no_ads=

 

It cites data showing the proportion of physicians working in small towns and rural areas declined to 9.8 per cent in 1996 from 14.9 per cent in 1991.

 

Wow

 

Actually it is a problem that has been growing for quite a while. Reports early as the late nineties have hinted at a potential shortage. There are a number of reasons that have been explored in various details in different studies. The most often named factors include insufficient enrollments into medical schools, loss of physicians to the US and reluctance to hire foreign physicians.

Further factors are that many physicians are reluctant to server rural areas and lack of certain specialists.

 

 

What about the 70,s and 80,s ? Why just the 90,s? And why worse now?

[CharonY]

Well, the demographics (which is likely to have changed significantly over the decades) has to play a role, too. And the question is whether when the problem has been acknowledged as one. It may be any kind of reasons, really. E.g. people do not like to stay or go back to rural areas and so on. I am not sure whether it is feasible to pin it down to any singular event.

[Pangloss]

If I understand my Canadian friends right, the general feeling is something along the lines of "Canadian health care is the worst form of health care, except for all the others". (With apologies to Churchill.)

 

Some degree of fuss has been made lately along the lines of how Americans will appreciate health care reform better after they've had it for a while. I think it's true that they'll stop favoring its overturning, but that's a very different thing from actually approving of it.

[nec209]

This is not good when they bring doctors to Canada or the US and they have to get a job working at walkmart do to we think they are not true doctors.

 

In Iran, Dr. Shahab Khanahmadi, a graduate of the Tehran University of Medical Sciences, had worked as a family physician for two years. He also worked as an assistant in the university neurology department’s clinical electrophysiology laboratory, studying diseases such as epilepsy. But in Canada, Khanahmadi hasn’t been able to work as a doctor. The closest he’s come to a hospital is as an unpaid assistant to a neurologist and as a volunteer in a family practice.

 

The 32-year-old says, “I am so disappointed.” He is the victim of a complicated bureaucracy that seems intent on shutting out foreign-trained physicians.

 

http://www.readersdigest.ca/mag/2004/08/doctors.html

 

Long post of doctors who cannot work has a doctor in Canada.

[Marat]

One reason for the current doctor shortage in Canada is that various provincial governments in the early 1990s took at look at spiraling healthcare costs projected for the future and stupidly thought that the best way to control them was to limit the number of new physicians being trained. But since the demand for healthcare is relatively inelastic, because healthcare is not a consumer good people can forego if there are insufficient suppliers, the result was an extreme doctor shortage. Another problem is that the medical societies, just to keep the profits of their members high, severely restrict the number of new physicians being trained, and this causes further shortages. The final problem is that the taxpayers want excellent healthcare with no waiting lists for treatment but they don't want to vote to provide enough money to fund what they want. Thus the U.S. spends 17% of its GNP to provide 84% of its population with healthcare, while Canada spends just 10% of its GNP to cover 100% of its population. That works out to the U.S. spending about twice as much per capita on healthcare as Canada does, so when people compare the poor standard of care and the long waiting lists in Canada with the better results in the U.S., they should keep in mind that this is not a fair comparison of socialist healthcare with private healthcare, but just of underfunded healthcare with well-funded healthcare.

 

The greatest advantage of the Canadian system is that you never have to worry that a sudden, catastrophic illness is going to bankrupt you and your family and destroy all the financial security you have been able to establish over a lifetime of working. The care is lower standard and the provision of care is extremely slow, but at least there are no user fees. Since it is funded out of general taxation, the effect of catastrophic illness expenses is that some multi-millionarie has to forego his golf vacation in the Bahamas this summer, rather than that some middle class family loses its savings, its ability to send the children to college, and its house.

[nec209]

Maybe the aging population isnt driving health costs, after all

 

Its become conventional wisdom in discussion of Canadas near out-of-control health costs: spending is being driven to ever-higher peaks by the demands of a fast-aging population. But is the wisdom based on fact? One of the most intriguing, and under-reported, aspects of a major report issued Thursday, suggests otherwise

 

 

Read more: http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/10/29/maybe-the-aging-population-isnt-driving-health-costs-after-all/#ixzz13rQoxcwB

Edited October 30, 2010 by nec209

[nec209]

EDMONTON — Emergency care in Alberta's hospitals has already collapsed for some families, including that of a teenager who died from a burst appendix that caused a heart attack in the Grey Nuns Hospital waiting room

 

Read more: http://www.edmontonjournal.com/health/Health+brass+minister+study+long+waits/3728542/story.html?cid=megadrop_story#ixzz14JANyPLm

 

=======================

 

Spending on health care is Canada is slowing, but is expected to reach nearly $192 billion this year — or $5,614 per person — according to a new report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, which released the figures Thursday.

 

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/10/28/health-care-spending.html#ixzz14JAYhZDy

[nec209]

An NDP health critic has found data from B.C.s Ministry of Health that reveals a rising trend where homeless patients who no longer require acute care remain in those beds, reports the CBC.

 

Read more: http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/11/15/b-c-hospitals-use-beds-to-house-homeless-says-ndp-healh-critic/#ixzz15Ncjp2Vn

 

 

Canada had about 68,000 physicians working last year, following the biggest annual increase in medical doctors in 20 years, according to a new report.

 

The Canadian Institute for Health Information released its annual report on the supply and payment of doctors on Thursday.

 

In 2009, about 68,100 physicians were working in Canada, an increase of almost 2,700 over the previous year — more than triple the rate of growth of the Canadian population as a whole, the report's authors found, and the highest growth rate in two decades.

 

 

 

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2010/12/02/doctor-supply-canada.html#ixzz17E61SqmJ

Edited December 5, 2010 by nec209

[nec209]

What do you think is going hapen to the heathcare in Canada in the next 5 years?

 

Is it going get batter or worse?

[Marat]

I think it will get slightly worse over the next five years. Part of the problem is that Canada now has a huge intake of new immigrants, typically from poor Third World countries where there is little or no healthcare available, so as soon as they arrive in Canada they rush to the nearest doctor, clinic, or hospital to make up for the previous 30 years of no healthcare. "Where is market here in Canada? I get goat testicles no where here in these places!" is the typical conversation you hear next to you as you wait for eight or nine hours for your walk-in clinic physician to call your name.

 

We are also still catching up for the idiocy described earlier, of healthcare officials in the 1990s restricting medical school intake as a 'clever' way to cut down healthcare costs, since the fewer doctors the smaller the bill, they thought. It never occurred to them that disease doesn't go away because there are fewer people to treat it.

 

Another problem is the foolish way medicine is practised in Canada, which has always had a strong police instinct and very little appreciation for human rights. Instead of addressing the problem of limited healthcare resources in Canada by leaving people with untreatable conditions alone, Canadian clinics, hospitals, and physicans over-monitor them, constantly insisting on tests, studies, and appointments, even though no therapeutic interventions could ever arise from the result of this monitoring. It does serve a role which both Bentham and Foucault would appreciate, however, in forcing patients to assume the disease role and keeping them in line.