Departure of Saudi students is a ‘strain’
Medical community scrambles to fill gap, IT firm also affected
The forced departure of Saudi students studying in Canada will strike a blow to our health care system, experts say.
In the wake of diplomatic tensions between the Saudi government and Canada, the kingdom has suspended scholarships for 16,000 students studying in Canada and ordered them to attend schools elsewhere.
More than 200 medical residents and fellows from the University of Toronto’s faculty of medicine are from Saudi Arabia.
“There are so many Saudi-sponsored physicians who are here and form a huge part of who performs patient care in Ontario hospitals,” said Dr. Caroline Just, a neurology resident physician in London, Ont.
Cuts to funding, combined with an increase in patients, have created a gap filled by foreign medical trainees, Just said.
“Patients certainly need these physicians to be here,” she said. “That gap has been filled by foreign-sponsored residents, a lot of whom are Saudi — not exclusively — but a lot.”
Just said there will now be the same number of patients, but with less doctors to treat them.
“This will be a very sudden rescinding of a lot of medical manpower,” she said. “I think it will be very, very challenging and probably put a lot of strain on patients and other doctors.”
Uof T has trained more than a thousand Saudi doctors over the last four decades, said Salvatore Spadafora, a professor in the school’s department of anesthesia and vice dean for post-MD education.
“They have enriched our programs and gone home and en- riched their own programs,” Spadafora said.
U of T’s faculty of medicine has 216 Saudi medical residents and fellows working in affiliated hospitals across the city. Fifty fellows and 36 residents work at University Health Network through U of T’s faculty of medicine.
Health network spokesperson Gillian Howard said in an email staff physicians and trainees will need to cover holes in schedules left by the departure of the Saudis, “which will be difficult.”
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre has committed to 61 trainees from Saudi Arabia for this academic year. Currently, 30 are working at Sunnybrook.
A small IT training firm in Scarborough is also reeling from the news.
The Techno Canada Centre of Excellence was hosting10 Saudi students for a six-week training course set to enddays before Saudi Arabia ordered its students to leave Canada.
Basu Mukherjee, the director of the school, said the order to Saudi students to leave is a devastating hit to his business, which has received contracts from the Islamic University of Medina for the last two years.
Mukherjee’s students were at his institute for a six-week course that was set to end Aug. 16.