health human resources

Us and Them: Why patient-defined health teams don’t communicate well

Patients and their families have many people who contribute to their care – different types of providers in different departments and institutions. Yet, despite sharing the goal of improving the same patient’s health, providers often don’t communicate with one another – as many patients know all too well. Many policy makers and providers are currently

Medical school enrolment is an expensive mystery

Why were 957 first-year students enrolled in Ontario’s six medical schools in September 2015? Why not, say, 800 or 1,001? You might think that medical school enrolment numbers are based on the best estimates of how many doctors will be needed in the future. But that’s not the case. Physician workforce planning is plagued by

Are we training too many doctors, or too few? Why no one really knows

Across Canada, governments, medical schools and health providing organizations continue to struggle with one of the most difficult questions in health care: How many doctors in each area of medicine do we train today to meet tomorrow’s health care needs? In Ontario, concern of an oversupply of doctors in some specialties led the government to

Hospitals must do more to help late-career docs transition to retirement

Mamta Gautam and Chris Caruthers

Unemployed youth is a worldwide problem.  This problem is creeping into medicine and affecting our new doctors too.  In recent years, there have been discussions about the lack of physicians in Canada. Much of this has been based on anecdotal and reported evidence of unmet health care needs of Canadians including long waiting lists and

Changes to temporary foreign worker program have unintended impacts on doctors

Reports of low-skilled Canadian workers being replaced with those from other countries spurred changes earlier this year to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. But they’ve made it harder for areas in need of physicians as well. The system was overhauled this summer after reports that companies were misusing the program, with Canadian workers at RBC and