Nearly half of doctors say UCP may drive them out of Alberta
Almost half of Alberta’s doctors have either made plans to or are considering looking for work outside of the province. If even a fraction of those physicians carry through, it will be a costly brain drain that will be felt by Albertans for generations to come.
Fully 42 per cent of 1,470 Alberta
physicians questioned between June 24 and July 3 are so unhappy with the funding framework unilaterally imposed on doctors by Alberta’s Health Minister Tyler Shandro and the United Conservative government that they are considering uprooting their practices and homes to another province or country.
“Over the past eight months, relations between the province and physicians have deteriorated to historic lows, driven by an extremely aggressive and inconsistent approach by the Minister of Health,” states a media release from the Alberta Medical Association on Friday.
More than one-third of doctors (34 per cent) say they may leave the profession or retire early.
Other alternatives being considered by Alberta’s disheartened physicians include changing how they offer services, including withdrawing them from Alberta Health Services facilities (48 per cent), reducing their hours (43 per cent) and laying off staff (34 per cent).
“These are really disturbing numbers,” said Dr. Christine Molnar, president of the AMA, the sole bargaining agent for more than 10,000 physicians in Alberta.
Like most Canadians, doctors have seen their businesses decline. While most doctors across the country would recognize that COVID-19 is to blame for their hardship, here doctors also blame the government for their difficulties.
The survey shows that 76 per cent of Alberta doctors say the number of patients they are seeing has decreased, 91 per cent report daily billings on average have decreased and more than half — 56 per cent — say they have had to reduce staff.
Only 16 per cent of those doctors say these losses are due solely to COVID-19, 80 per cent blame a combination of the government’s funding changes and the pandemic, and four per cent say losses are due to the government’s funding changes alone.
Things have gotten so bad, the AMA filed a 19-page lawsuit against the government in early April. On Thursday, the government responded with an 11-page statement of defence.
Shandro has repeatedly said that overall funding for physicians in Alberta will reach an all-time high of $5.4 billion for this fiscal year, even before COVID-19 was a reality, and that Alberta doctors are the highest paid in the country — by more than $94,000 annually on average than a doctor in Ontario, for instance.
Shandro has said that if changes hadn’t been made, physician compensation would have cost taxpayers an additional $2 billion over the next three years, which is simply unsustainable.
“Alberta physicians are not grossly overpaid relative to other physicians in Canada,” Molnar said during a telephone interview.
“The reason that physicians are leaving Alberta has almost nothing to do with money,” she said. “It has everything to do with the hostile environment that’s been created, the instability and uncertainty of the future of health care in Alberta.”
The government’s statement of defence says that when negotiations between the province and the AMA entered into mediation on Jan. 31, “The AMA was not prepared for mediation. It did not table any proposals for Alberta Health to consider until the final day of mediation. It did not offer any proposals regarding the SOMB (Schedule of Medical Benefits) Proposals despite the fact that it demanded that this subject be brought to the bargaining table for further discussion.”
Following mediation, the parties agreed that negotiations were at an impasse, says the statement.
On Feb. 20, Shandro signed an order in council tearing up the doctors’ contract with the province through Bill 21.
Molnar claims the UCP government would have been working on Bill 21 for months.
“It takes months to create and develop legislation, so the government was working on Bill 21, designed to remove our right to arbitration, even as they were supposedly negotiating with us in good faith,” she said.
Molnar says the AMA offered to initially cut physician compensation by five per cent across the board and were open to negotiations.
“There’s a shortage of doctors worldwide,” said Molnar, a diagnostic radiologist and nuclear medicine specialist based in Calgary.
“There’s a shortage of doctors in Canada, and that includes family physicians as well as other specialties. There’s no problem relocating within Canada,” she said.
Even though Alberta is second only to British Columbia in its effective handling of COVID-19 — with the second lowest number of deaths per million people in Canada — Premier Jason Kenney’s popularity is the second lowest in the country at 48 per cent. He is not getting the kind of COVID -19 popularity boost most other premiers have enjoyed.
In other words, Kenney’s government has been effective but its bedside manner is monstrous when it comes to dealing with doctors who risk their lives battling this pandemic.
If, as this poll suggests, Alberta’s doctors leave en masse for friendlier locales, Kenney’s popularity can be expected to continue to drop along with that of the UCP caucus, and it will be his government’s re-electability that will be on life support.