That does sound a good idea, however may want to add the condition that if the Canadian taxpayers pays for your medical training, then you owe it to the country to work there and practice medicine for a minimal amount of time.

Otherwise you will get people taking the training, then moving to another country, not paying taxes in Canada and other countries getting the benefit.

Mitigate the risk BEFORE it happens.

@simonlevesque low? How do you afford it without already having money? Debt. We have a shortage of doctors but we expect people to do over $100k in debt to become one.

Perhaps we would not have such a shortage if that were not the case.

Many people cannot even consider medical school for this very reason. Many people don’t have the ability to live at home. Or have to chip in at home, because their parents make minimum wage. Where will that money come from?

That is true for almost every "necessary" societal employment needs.

But that gets back to the "Keep em uneducated, stupid, & poor" thrust of the GQP here to defund education to make it harder to afford any higher schooling.

Sadly the norm & common these days.

@simonlevesque Here's some relevant data- when considering that med school is eight years plus residency, it's definitely among the most expensive degrees out there, with a debt load to match

educationdata.org/average-cost….

shemmassianconsulting.com/blog…

Tuition at Every Medical School in the United States (Updated in 2022)

Medical school tuition and fees for out-of-state students, listed from highest to lowest

^{Dr. Shemmassian (Shemmassian Academic Consulting)}

If you squint and look at it upside down, immigration is another way of saying "Medical school should be much cheaper!"

My grandparents alone had three grandkids that went to medical school in Nigeria, and later practiced medicine in Canada. Some even teach at Canadian medical schools!

And medical school in Nigeria does not cost $150K. Nursing school in the Philippines is affordable too.

Athletes consider playing overseas. I don't know if enough aspiring med students consider it.

yep school costs are such a big hurdle for these kinds of professions!

My husband is in law school in the US and basically everyone at his school is forced to go into very big corporate law firms after graduating because there’s no other way to pay off their massive student loans

So if people want to be public defenders or go into social justice law or even some small boutique thing they can’t until later in their career once loans are paid off

The thing I personally would like to see, is doctors not made to work ridiculously long hours where their judgement could (according to studies it is) potentially cost a person their life.

Actual medical studies show that long hours and high stress lead to bad outcomes. Had a doctor miss a brain injury I suffered...

And then docs tell you to reduce stress. 🤨

not to mention the 90s decisions to limit the number of med school slots

dead honest i’m in a position where i’m willing to tolerate the extended traumatic experience of modern medical education but it still would take me 6y minimum to be a doctor capable of having their own practice and basically no med school will me anyways

in combination with the extraordinary difficulty foreign trained doctors face this was doomed to bite us in the collective backside about now anyways

In Poland we have free higher education, including medical. For some. Some more will pay for the university. Some more will go to cheaper countries. We get an influx of people, including doctors from Ukraine. Yet there is still not enough.

Could it be the case, that there will never truly be enough?

This presumes the issue is lack of interest, but there’s no indication that there’s a shortage of interested candidates. The bigger med schools in Canada only accept 2-5% of applicants each year.

The biggest hurdle is that we simply aren’t training enough doctors. We are accepting 3k students a year, but we would need to add 30k to catch up to the OECD average for physicians per capita.

Fix that, then we can worry about loans.

not to mention working conditions.

I didn’t go into medicine even though my mom would have paid for it. She was an Ob/Gyn and routinely worked 60-80 hours a week and was regularly on call. The amount of sacrifice to get into the field in terms of residencies and internships didn’t help either.

The medical training system is very harsh and awful for trainee’s mental health, as I’ve seen from several friends who decided to do it.

I want to work to live, not live to work.

Another suggestion is low cost loans to set up a new practice.

It's incredibly expensive to set up shop.

The number of medical schools and limitations on class sizes in Canada is also bottlenecked by conservative governments hoping to gin up dissatisfaction with national public health care.

Well, that, and the gatekeeping. Keep the numbers low to keep the remuneration high is an objective of the provincial medical associations, and they have a lot of influence on the training rates. We should be doubling those, at least.

We'd get better doctors if there was a published set of requirements to apply and everyone meeting or exceeding that level got their name put in the hat, with those getting an accepting being drawn at random.

Canadian universities aren't particularly trying to graduate more doctors. Spots are not available for every qualified and able-to-pay applicant. The associations of doctors wish to keep numbers fairly limited and lobby to keep spots restricted, so that the ratio of Drs. to citizens is stable.

Unemployment among Canadian-trained Drs. in Canada is basically 0%.

my family doctor just died. 83 years old. Saw patients the same day. He's been our family doctor for more than 30 years. No one to take over his practice so it's closing and we all have to find a new family doctor.

Unbelievable that he couldn't find someone to take it over, isn't it?

We need more capacity for med school as well. Seems ridiculous that my alma mater only took in 60 med students per year, and you needed an insane resume full of volunteering, world travel, etc.

Really set up for the privileged few. I'm sure thousands of potentially great doctors are rejected every year because they look fairly dull on paper and, especially if they grew up disadvantaged.

Fascinating and seems so reasonable. Love how they've dedicated and worked themselves to such exhaustion that they really don't care what anyone calls it anymore. Respect.

But I'm never quite sure why any scientist would refer to the Paleolithic Era humans as "fully modern." Wouldn't it be more accurate to say it indicates that what we are is fully Paleolithic? 🧐