Quote:
Originally posted by monody
speaking for the east coast:
basically, our biggest problem with the medical system is that there are too few doctors.
apparently, in my province, roughly 75% of the population does not have a family doctor. waiting lists for family doctors are years long. now that is an unsubstantiated quote. i have no statistics to support that, but personal knowledge. i personally have not seen a doctor in seven years.
what this adds up to is overburdgeoned clinics and emergency rooms and overworked, underpaid nurses.
would a two-teir system help this situation?
most likely not. could it hurt? again, i don't see how.
lets try tackling this from a different angle:
how would you propose to FIX our broken system, and make it work again?
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This problem you can lay squarely at the feet of the doctors.
It is not uncommon in all provinces that the small towns are without family doctors cause basically medical grads don't want to work there. (no offense to small town folks)
Ontario has recently offered some incentives in this area to foreign doctors stating that they can get their licenses in half the time if they agree to work in small communities. There are also incentive programs to medical students.
The other part of the problem is simply that we are not graduating enough doctors. They should DOUBLE the number of students taken into medical school with the proviso that they must work 5 years in a small community.
But the OMA (Ontario Medical Association) will not permit them to increase the number of graduating medical students because this will increase the number of doctors on the market. Doctors like to think of themselves as gods and if it is demonstrated that more people can easily pass medical school, you errode their (the doctor's) position in god-dom.
The requirements to get into medical school are rediculous. There are lots of qualified people who get rejected because they don't have a 95% average out of a science background. The truth of the matter is that you do need brains to be a GP, but you don't have to be Einstein.
It's politics when it comes to this issue.