A move by the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Alberta in changing the assessments required of South African doctors could potentially bring rural clinics and hospitals to their knees, according to Dr. Guy Lamoureux, the chief of staff at the Bonnyville Health Care centre.
Lamoureux was one of the people attending a Lakeland Physician Recruitment meeting in St. Paul on Thursday night. Attending the meeting at the request of MP Brian Storseth was his fellow MP, Rick Dykstra, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, who took feedback on how the federal government could help expedite the immigration process for foreign doctors.
However, the bulk of the meeting focused on a move by the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Alberta to increase the assessment period for South African doctors wanting to practice in this province. Storseth, Dykstra and representatives of municipalities in the Lakeland area heard Lamoureux express his fears about the change, as he said it would make it “virtually impossible” to recruit doctors from South Africa. “This is big time, serious stuff,” he said, adding that many northeast Albertan communities have relied on recruiting South African doctors to serve medical needs. If one put all the Canadian medical graduates currently working in the area together, it wouldn’t be enough to run even one facility in this zone, he said.
One person at the meeting noted that in Cold Lake, 80 per cent of the doctors are from South Africa. Lamoureux said he understood that Cold Lake was close to recruiting another doctor from South Africa, while Bonnyville had been ready to bring two more doctors from South Africa to its town. “Suddenly, they got a letter saying they no longer qualified,” he said of Bonnyville’s potential recruits.
While it used to seem like recruiting foreign doctors was a matter of getting past a four foot fence, recruitment now felt like facing a twenty foot wall, said Lamoureux. “If this thing goes through, we’re all going to be on the verge of closure within three or four years.”
In a phone interview after the meeting, Kelly Eby, a spokesperson with the college, said all international medical graduates are subject to evaluation to make sure their medical training is equivalent to Canadian medical training. South Africa and countries such as Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the United States were recognized as having roughly equivalent medical training; medical graduates from these countries only had to undergo two weeks of clinical assessment, followed by a three month assessment period to practice in Alberta. However, the rules for South African graduates changed last fall after the College of Family Physicians in Canada recently reviewed clinical training in a variety of countries.
“South Africa did not participate in the process,” Eby said. The South African government has been loathe to cooperate with medical training assessments over concerns about losing its own medical graduates to other countries. “So we, basically as a country, have no way of knowing if their training is equivalent.”
Now South African doctors will have to undergo a three month clinical assessment, followed by another three months of assessment to practice in Alberta. One challenge created by this move, Eby noted, was that doctors are not allowed to bill Alberta Health Services for the first three months of assessment, meaning that for those initial three months, they must find another source of support, whether that’s through a regional health authority or a municipality or somewhere else. Every province has different standards on assessments as well, which makes for a uneven playing field, even though there is a move in Canada to create consistent standards for assessments.
The college had received a “fair amount of feedback” on the change, said Eby, noting, “When you change the rules, there will be people that are not supportive.” She acknowledged that it may be more difficult now to recruit doctors from South Africa, but said, “Our response is we are doing what we need to do to ensure public safety.” People could still recruit doctors from South Africa, however, and she said she didn’t know what happened in the case mentioned by Lamoureux, where South African potential recruits were told they no longer qualified.
Lamoureux said he felt that the former assessment period was adequate to know if doctors were properly trained, and added that several very good South African doctors practice in northeast Alberta. If the college was intent on changing the rules, then he felt the province had to secure a new supply of foreign doctors before it cut off the old supply. “There’s got to be a balance there.”
He said the college had to hear from people on the impact this would have on rural communities. “Now we need the pressure to come from the citizens.”
Storseth said he would send a letter to the college, and recommended to those around the table that their municipalities do the same.
