Canada

It's unfortunate you have to make that distinction, but thank you.

It's definitely a complex issue, but I think a few things could help in my experience as the spouse of a physician in rural SK with an engineering background.

• Pay parity - rural family physicians provide many of the same services as urban ER docs would, but are paid considerably less, while having worse work-life balance. Family docs can also do just one year of ER residency add-on and work solely in emergency medicine. This makes family practice much less attractive and incentivizes many family docs to pursue subspecialties. One of Regina's hospitals' ERs are staffed fully by family doctors, and we've had 2 of our 14 doctors leave recently to work in non-primary care specialties, with another also pondering leaving, effectively saying, "I can make more money, see less patients in a day, and have better work-life balance just an hour down the road, why should I stay here?" With this, family physicians have considerably higher overhead compared to really any other specialty. Clinic rent, clinic staff, clinic equipment, an EMR subscription, IT equipment all adds up. Work in a hospital and you have none of that. We also just had a health authority administrator ask the doctors here, who practice privately, to pay for scheduling software for the hospital. It's insulting, really.

• Support and scrutinize education - there is med student and residency education opportunities throughout many rural sites in our province, but there's become a lack of supports around those positions. Lack of housing for electives, stagnant med school intake and family residency spots. If you want more doctors, you need to educate more doctors and provide the adequate support in order to do so. Less on the government side and more towards education, but there are also some residency programs and/or preceptors whose residents are consistently behind standards, yet there seems to be no oversight or corrective measures taken. This is more on substandard self-governance and entitlement of certain individuals, though.

If I had to boil it down, I'd say those who make decisions in government have a complete lack of understanding of the day to day operations and expenses of rural physicians. A government rep was flabbergasted when she heard that family physicians often have several hours of non-patient facing time in a day when she asked why clinics can't be open 8-5 in a recent meeting. A 6-hour clinic day would often produce 2 hours of paperwork, or you'd need to leave 1 weekday for paperwork if you worked the other 4 seeing patients. Yet, given this lack of understanding, they still refuse to pay doctors for their time to meet to discuss these issues.