Eroding support of doctors causes permanent damage

Many of us have read headlines from family physician groups across the country about a critical shortage and underfunding of family physicians.

We’ve heard that primary care providers are retiring early, and others are leaving comprehensive longitudinal family medicine to work in walk-in clinics and esthetics. All of these steps are often for the protection of their psychological and financial well-being.

But this issue isn’t just about today’s patients — if this continues, we may end up in a Canada without access to comprehensive family medicine altogether.

Every year, fewer Canadian medical students are choosing medicine as a specialty. Governments have responded with promises of new medical schools, increasing residency training seats in family medicine, and various other strong and reasonable long-term plans to assist in making the workforce in family medicine more robust.

As a resident learner in a different specialty, I can tell you that while all those steps are great, something bigger needs to change immediately.

Medical education, regardless of specialty, is based on an apprenticeship, mentorship-based system. The educational mantra is see one, do one, teach one. In essence, medical learners learn skills and practise styles by observation and supervised practise. This, in turn, influences how they practise in the future.

Medical education is also often unpaid, or paid through small honorariums, and results in slowing an often already overworked and burned out supervising physician even more.

If we do not improve the working conditions for comprehensive family physicians today, we not only decrease our capacity to train current trainees in this model, we also erode their ability to train future doctors.

Last week, Ourcare released a document after speaking to thousands of people from across Canada and called for governments to support family medicine in six ways. All of these recommendations are centred around every patient in Canada having access to a comprehensive team-based primary care physician that meets the needs of the community they serve.

I stand with my family physician colleagues and believe governments need to listen to their needs immediately so that more of them stay within comprehensive family medicine and help train the future workforce in this model. This situation cannot wait.

Family medicine residency lasts two years — with every year we wait to improve the psychological safety of our family physicians, it’s another cohort of learners at risk of training in a model that does not promote a comprehensive model. And another cohort of medical students who decide not to enter family medicine.

We can build all of the new medical schools and hospitals we want. But if we don’t have enough family doctors practising comprehensive family medicine with the time to train these young physicians, recruiting more learners accomplishes very little.

The time is now.