nursemask

There is apparently a shortage of doctors and this shortage is expected to get worse in the future.

Rather than more doctors I would suggest getting more Nurse Practitioners.

In my case, over the years, I have been switched from one doctor to another. Two of them ran to the U.S. while others retired or for other reasons gave up their practice. Then I was assigned to a Nurse Practitioner at the Family Health Team. I found this to be more than satisfactory. I thought there would be some stability on into the future. (If something was complicated my NP had a doctor to call on.)

Then suddenly I was switched to a doctor, (This was well  before Covid.) I don't know why except it appeared to be a decision made by the doctor run Family Health Team. In other locations FHT doctors are hired and are not partners in an enterprise as I understand is the case in Owen Sound.

Paying tuition for a nurse to upgrade to Nurse Practitioner status would be a lot cheaper than paying tuition for a medical student I would think.

I do not pretend to understand all the complexities of this issue but the above is the situation as I see it. In a former life I was an "efficiency expert", we would break a job down into its separate components, create an assembly line and then look for the bottlenecks.

If doctors are the bottleneck then remove tasks that others could perform.

Bill Moses