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| Charlie Fidelman |
| Montreal Gazette |
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
To combat increasing wait times and a chronic shortage of medical staff, Quebec is easing restrictions on foreign-trained doctors.
The aim is to improve the lot of thousands of Quebecers who are without a family doctor, health officials said Monday.
Yves Lamontagne, head of the Quebec College of Physicians, the province's professional order, would not elaborate yesterday on the "certain measures to relax" the rules on doctors trained abroad.
Yolande Tétreault, a converted Muslim, presents her views on Muslim life in Quebec to the Bouchard-Taylor commission on "reasonable accommodations" of minorities yesterday.
Details are to be made public at a news conference today.
The College of Physicians is expected to announce that it will grant permanent permits to foreign doctors after five years in Quebec rather than continue the current practice of renewing temporary permits annually.
The province is short 800 family physicians, and an estimated 800,000 people do not have a general practitioner.
According to Statistics Canada, 24.8 per cent of Quebecers age 12 or older don't have a GP, compared with 8.8 per cent in Ontario and 14 per cent across Canada.
"That's what we were thinking - we want to help Quebecers," Lamontagne said.
The College went ahead with changes after the provincial Health Department intervened, said Isabelle Merizzi, an aide to Quebec Health Minister Philippe Couillard.
"We are happy," Merizzi said.
"The government clearly asked them to take this path, but they were already willing to go there."
Foreign doctors are also overjoyed at this step forward, said Jean-Luc Monfrais, head of the Quebec Association of Physicians with Restricted Permits.
Unlike immigrants seeking recognition for their medical studies, these international medical graduates were actively selected and recruited by the Quebec government to fill gaps in hospitals, universities, clinics and faraway regions lacking in manpower, Monfrais said.
A restricted permit allows a doctor to work temporarily, but only in a specific geographical location, and after completing a three-month supervised stint in a hospital. About 350 physicians from outside Canada and the United States now work in Quebec on such permits.
"Many (foreign) doctors have already left, returning to their own countries to complain there is no future here," Monfrais said.
"I just got a letter from a doctor, a specialist in drug abuse, that she's returning to her native Belgium."
Monfrais said L'Express, a French newspaper, recently ran stories warning readers of "the traps of Quebec" for workers in the health milieu. "That's not good for Quebec," he said.
So the move to relax the rules will go a long way to revive recruitment, Monfrais said.
But it's not clear whether foreign doctors will be awarded full recognition. "That's what we've been fighting for," said Monfrais, chief of anaesthesiology at Hôtel Dieu de Sorel Hospital.
He noted that, although recruited to come here, foreign doctors find themselves in a peculiar situation. Their medical education is recognized, but their diplomas aren't.
"I'm head of anaesthesiology of the department here ... but if I want my diploma (recognized in Quebec), I'll have to retake the exam - for a diploma I got 30 years ago" in France, Monfrais said in an earlier interview. He must renew his permit annually.
