physician supply

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

Why are so many Canadians going abroad to study medicine?

Canadian doctors studying abroad

Over the past five years, the number of Canadians studying medicine abroad has more than doubled. Almost all of these medical students want to practice in Canada. Is it good for Canada to rely on foreign medical schools to train our future doctors? David Li, a family doctor in Oshawa, is one of Ross University’s