The Society for Canadians Studying Medicine Abroad (SOCASMA) is having its Annual General Meeting on Thursday, November 12, 2014 at 7 pm at the Arbutus Club on 2001 Nanton Avenue, in Vancouver.
SOCASMA has been fighting for the rights of Canadians who choose to study medicine overseas since 2010. SOCASMA states that the current system for entry level medical jobs is unconstitutional and contrary to public interest.
The Ministry of Advanced Education states in its current service plan: “We need to expand our international focus in B.C. to remain competitive in an increasingly globalized world. This will lead to greater understanding and tolerance, enriching personal connections between British Columbians and other people around the world. It will also help create and maintain key international pathways for commerce, research and innovation.”
Yet when students choose to study at reputable international medical schools, they are not allowed to compete for jobs as resident physicians against students who chose to study in Canadian medical schools. This has nothing to do with the quality of the medical education. Even medical students graduating from Oxford and Cambridge, ranked first and third in the world by Times, cannot come back to Canada to compete against Canadian medical school graduates for resident physician jobs.
This prohibition against competing against Canadian university graduates is unique to medicine. In all other professions, once a Canadian has proven that he has the knowledge and skills of a Canadian graduate, he is allowed to compete for the same jobs as if he had graduated from a Canadian university.
BC cannot afford to educate all the doctors it needs. Each medical graduate costs the tax payer over $400,000. Now we need more graduates than ever. Historically 90% of medical school graduates were males. Today less than half are males. Historically doctors worked 80 hours per week. Today, a number of female doctors take time out, choose not to work, or work part time. At the same time many male doctors currently seek life balance and are not prepared to work long hours. The aging baby boomers will increase the need for medical care. More BC doctors are being lost to the USA and other provinces. Only 56% of UBC medical school graduates stay in BC to work as resident physicians.
The government puts up barriers preventing medical graduates we need from coming home by denying them access to entry level jobs as resident physicians. Resident physicians work long hours for low pay. A beginning resident gets paid $50,000 plus benefits. There is no statistical information in BC that establishes what it would take to replace the services performed by residents. However, physicians working with resident physicians estimate that it would probably take 1.5 fully licensed physicians to replace the services provided by a resident. The average gross payment per fully licensed physician is more than $300,000 per year. Although residents are less efficient than fully licensed doctors, at least when they start, considering the longer hours worked by resident physician and vast discrepancy in cost, even factoring in supervision costs, utilizing the services of resident physicians makes financial sense according to Harvard University. In the USA, hospitals use resident physicians to increase their profits.
It is difficult to see the sense in breaking up families by forcing medical graduates from BC to leave BC and Canada to find work, while we pay other government employees to recruit foreigners to meet the doctor shortage. More information can be found at socasma.com.
