The popularity of family medicine continues to decline among Quebec students. According to data from the Canadian Resident Matching Service (CaRMS), 91 family medicine residency positions remain vacant following the first round of matching.
CaRMS is the pan-Canadian organization that assigns graduating medical students a specialty for their residency. This year’s results also show that only six specialty medicine residency positions remain vacant. In other words, more than 90% of all unfilled medical residency positions in the province are in family medicine.
“It doesn’t surprise me, but it saddens me deeply. It’s a great disappointment,” commented in an interview with The Canadian Press the president of the Federation of General Practitioners of Quebec (FMOQ), Dr.r Marc-André Amyot.
According to the FMOQ, over the past 12 years, there have been nearly 600 family medicine training positions that have not been filled. “That’s 600 doctors who will not be available to provide services to Quebecers for the next 30 years. It’s catastrophic,” worries the Dr Amyot.
It is expected that family medicine residency positions will be filled in the second round of matching. Last year, for example, 26 positions were filled between the first and second rounds, going from 99 to 73 vacant places.
“We will have to see at the end of the second round how many are left free and then we will know if we succeed in filling the departures,” said the Dr Amyot. He argued that 25% of family doctors in Quebec are over 60 years old and that every year, there are more and more departures.
He is concerned to see that the public network has lost around forty family doctors over the past year, which adds to the actual shortage of more than 1,200 family doctors.
“We are currently seeing the difficulties of access (to a family doctor) and all this reflects a severe shortage of family doctors. And if we do not correct the situation, the shortage will not improve, it will deteriorate,” warns the president of the FMOQ.
For several years, he has noticed that many students choose to take a sabbatical year rather than choose the specialization in family medicine.
The problem of attractiveness of this discipline is the cause, according to the union. “We will have to revise our position, together, the different actors who are important in the attractiveness of family medicine,” recognized the Dr Amyot. Whether it is the ministry or the universities, it is clear that our actions have not borne the expected results. »
According to him, to make family medicine more attractive to graduates, it is a priority to correct the remuneration gaps between family doctors and other specialists.
He also believes that the provincial government must eliminate legislative measures that it considers coercive and further attack administrative burden and work overload.
There is a demeaning discourse that family doctors currently face, adds the Dr Amyot. “ [Il faut] stop the implication that if family doctors did their job well, there would be less difficulty in access. That’s not it at all, he laments. What we want is collaboration with the ministry to improve services to the population. »
The president of the FMOQ also emphasizes that this collaboration has worked well in the past. He cited the 930,000 patients supported by family doctors following Bill 11 of the Legault government, which called for the care of 500,000 patients.
“The first element before trying to promote the profession, we must stop the devaluation and denigration”, affirms the Dr Amyot.
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