Past time for a transparent medical residency process

Re New doctors needing a residency in Canada face “match day” with few available spots, Online, Feb. 25 Alex Mckeen provides an excellent summary of the crisis facing Canadian medical graduates (CMGs) seeking residency this year. The problem, however, goes far beyond CMGs.

Canadians studying medicine abroad (CSAs) should have equal rights, as Canadians, to compete for these residency spaces, yet are marginalized by unfair eligibility criteria set for the Canadian Residency Matching program by the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care and the Ontario faculties of medicine.

CSAs are forced to participate in a separate international medical graduate stream rather than competing directly against CMGs, and many specialties are not available to them.

Further, CSAs who completed premedical degrees in Canada, like CMGs, have often received public funding for their undergraduate education. As with CMGs, wasting this resource is also a “huge liability.”

Meanwhile, valuable resources that could be used to train our own CMG and CSA graduates are being sold to international visa trainees, resulting in the recent Saudi medical resident crisis.

It’s past time for a truly transparent, fair, objective and equitable process to be established for filling these publicly funded residency positions. Malcolm M. MacFarlane, Lindsay, Ont.