Every Albertan should welcome this initiative with open arms, especially family physicians, emergency room physicians, and hospital administrators around the province, who are all overworked, over-stressed, and overdue for help. As a former resident of BC without a family doctor for two years, I would have been delighted. But sadly, the Alberta Medical Association has taken a very different approach despite calling for reforms from the government to alleviate the strains on hospitals and family medicine physicians.

As of next spring, I will have spent ten years in university or medical school training to get to this point - deciding what specialty to pursue as a physician. While family medicine should be a natural consideration, it's increasingly becoming the road less travelled for new graduates like me. The reasons are manifold, complex, and deeply rooted in the current state of Canada's healthcare system. Allow me to dissect why family medicine is losing its allure for the next generation of doctors.

NL has a golden opportunity to solve its surgical backlog problem because of the Premier's background as an accomplished surgeon. He is uniquely qualified to put NL at the forefront of fixing one of Canada’s healthcare system's most vexing problems, large and growing surgical backlogs. If someone as knowledgeable as Premier Furey cannot solve this problem then the rest of Canada’s premiers are in for a rough road in solving their own surgical backlog issues. Let's hope the financial resources are there to make this a seminal moment in NL's history.

No matter what our Federal or Provincial Governments do, there will be a shortage of doctors in Canada for at least the next ten years. In a recent story from RBC (see in my news section), Canada is projected to have a shortage of approximately 44,000 physicians by 2028. It seems high to me, but the fact remains that physician shortages are here to stay. While our governments actively recruit foreign-trained doctors, this is not a long-term strategy to solve Canada’s physician shortage.

According to the Fraser Institute's calculations, the private cost borne by Newfoundlanders was estimated to be $112,520,000 annually or $308,274 per day.

While provincial governments often label every initiative as a "game-changer," the reality is that there are no game-changers. Instead, we make incremental changes routinely to eliminate inefficiencies, improve primary care access, and reduce surgical waiting times.

I decided to investigate the Canadian Health Care System to determine what was happening.  I found lots of information from many sources, but no one put it all together to answer my two burning questions.  'Why is Canada's health care system broken, and how can it be fixed?'  I couldn't find the answer, so I thought about starting a blog to find out and let the rest of Canada know what I discovered.

Based on historical numbers of doctors per 100,000 Canadians, there is no shortage today, but 6 million Canadians without a family would argue differently. Two facts are true: we have more doctors today per 100,000 Canadians, 271 in 2019 per CMA, than we ever have, and 6 million Canadians are without a family physician.

Well, we all know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Our provincial governments wanted to cap healthcare spending growth, so with little data, they set out to do just that. So let me make this bold statement at the start of this blog post:

Today’s Shortages Were Directly Caused by Short-Sighted Provincial Government Decisions