Door re-opens to the world
It’s good to see the province is getting back the means to recruit and assess capable family doctors from many countries — and not just from a few whose medical schools and health systems are familiar to our licensing body.
Being able to attract good primary-care physicians from around the globe, and to ensure they are “practice-ready” for Nova Scotia, is a key element in properly serving the 40,000 people seeking a family doctor or collaborative care practice.
But for the last three years, the province hasn’t had the necessary program to do this.
Between 2005 and 2015, we did have that tool. The Clinician Assessment for Practice Program (CAPP), run by the College of Physician and Surgeons, which licenses doctors in Nova Scotia, allowed doctors from outside familiar jurisdictions (like the U.S. and Britain) to come here, take a practice-ready assessment program and practise under supervision and a conditional licence in an underserved community while they worked toward a full licence.
CAPP brought about 100 doctors here over a decade and was particularly significant for towns and rural communities. But the College discontinued CAPP in 2015. It agreed with other provincial licensing bodies that a single, national set of practice-ready standards, approved by the Medical Council of Canada, would better serve public safety.
The single standard made additional sense when provincial licensing bodies, including the Nova Scotia College, saw a need to invest significantly in modernizing their programs to rely less on one-time exams and more on a range of assessment methods.
Unfortunately, this approach of ending CAPP while a better replacement was created left Nova Scotia and other provinces without a practical way to recruit doctors from many places that are training good physicians.
Those three lost years have been costly when retirements, physician burnout, hostile federal tax changes and low fee schedules have fuelled a family doctor shortage.
Dr. Lynn Harrigan, Nova Scotia Health Authority’s vice president of medicine and integrated health services, said in an interview with The Chronicle Herald this week that the significance of losing CAPP has been underestimated. In revealing that the replacement program has been approved by the province — a decision confirmed by the Health Department Friday — she noted primary care would be in a different situation today if we had the 30 additional doctors CAPP would have brought here in the last three years.
So kudos to Dr. Harrigan and her colleagues for organizing that vital replacement and to the government for funding it.
Managed by Dalhousie Family Medicine, the program will align with the Medical Council’s national standards and accept 10 candidates approved by the College each year.
Those who successfully complete a three-month assessment will get a conditional licence to work in underserved areas that the department says will include HRM, the Valley and northern Nova Scotia. The first candidates are expected to begin practice by the fall of 2019.
This program is very much needed. We need doctors and we need to be recruitment-ready for fine ones who are trained in many more places than in the past and who are indeed ready to join our communities and serve them well.