The provincial New Democratic Party suggested this week that student doctors of the Northern Medical Program should be required to stay in the north for a period of five to seven years upon graduation to ensure the region has a steady supply of new doctors.
NDP health critic Mike Farnworth was speaking about recent findings that only a fraction of graduates from the Northern Medical Program had actually gotten local employment.
He suggested a contract be signed forcing the student to stay in the region as a condition of their schooling.
Farnworth was unavailable for comment Thursday following these statements.
Provincial Minister of Health Mike de Jong responded, saying the concern for northern doctors was laudable, but the only way to ensure that happens is to train them in the north and let them make the decision to stay be freely made.
"Only the first class has graduated," de Jong said. "Some have completed their residence, about a dozen, and of those, half have decided to stay in the north. Our object in establishing a northern medical student pool was to improve the probability of staying there to work, informed by the knowledge that people do tend to stay where they train. The very early indications are, that is occurring."
de Jong said there were a couple of key reasons why some from any given graduating class might decide to practice elsewhere. In many cases the new doctor wants to pursue a residence position in a specialty that isn't offered here. In some cases, they might want to stay, but there are no positions for them in a particular specialty.
Those, said the minister, are doctors that might decide later to come back and take on a full practice later in their career.
"For a true measure of success, you have to look five, 10 years down the road. That is when we will have a truer view of what's happening," said de Jong. "The likelihood of that doctor returning to northern B.C. is exponentially higher because that training was received there."
de Jong said incentives like student loan forgiveness was a better way to convince a doctor to make the north home. Otherwise, the Northern Medical Program would have to be limited only to training for certain sorts of doctors, not to mention it would foster regional divisions in the medical profession, pitting one school and geographic area against another.
"We want families in the north to have access to the best trained professionals, so we are not going to limit their training opportunities just because it is a northern medical school. Quite the contrary," he said.
"I can tell you, because of incentives like loan forgiveness and training opportunities, the situation in northern and rural B.C. is already far better than it was in the 1990s. Mike Farnworth [was once the Minister of Health during that period] so hearing these comments from him now is a little hard to take, because the shortage we are suffering from is largely attributable to the fact we trained nobody in the north back in the 1990s and nothing was done in that critical time to address what we knew was going to be a shortage."
