Posthaste: A severe doctor shortage in Canada is fast approaching, RBC report says

Humber River Hospital in Toronto

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Finding a family doctor in Canada is about to get harder, since the country will be short approximately 44,000 physicians before the end of the decade, according to a new report by the Royal Bank of Canada.

The number of adults who do not have access to a family doctor has already risen to roughly six million from 4.6 million in 2019. The situation is even more dire in rural communities where only eight per cent of all physicians are serving nearly one-fifth of the country’s population, the report said.

The doctor shortage is also having an impact on the broader health-care system. Without quick access to doctors, patients are turning to emergency departments already overwhelmed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Canada’s supply of doctors has fallen behind its peers in the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with the number of doctors per capita well behind major economies such as France and Germany. Canada would need to train or hire 30,000 more physicians by 2028 to match the average number of doctors among its OECD peers, according to the RBC report.

Addressing this health-care crunch is especially critical as Canada’s population is set to rise 7.7 per cent by 2028, but doing so will not be easy. Easing the chain of bottlenecks in the health-care system is more complex than simply recruiting more individuals to study medicine, according to the report. Instead, it points to various choke points that have contributed to the chronic shortage.

The first is that all 17 Canadian medical schools limit student admissions to less than 3,000 per year. The second is that a disproportionate number of graduates from international medical schools do not end up with residency positions. More than 90 per cent of the roughly 2,100 applications who went unmatched in the past three years were international medical graduates.

“More should be done to attract internationally trained physicians who can begin providing care to Canadians quickly,” the report’s authors, Ben Richardson, Yadullah Hussain and Naomi Powell, said.

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Another choke point is that the share of medical students choosing to study family medicine, the discipline most in demand, is declining. “An incentive drive to encourage more people to pursue this career, and for medical practitioners to take trainees, is urgently needed,” the authors said.

The report identified several ways to close the gap, including investing funds in the Canadian medical system to expand the capacity of hospital and university networks, add educators and assessors, and increase residency spaces.

Streamlining credential recognition for internationally trained physicians and medical graduates will also be “crucial,” the authors said.

Other suggestions include using technology to streamline the prescription process and using tele-health consultations to reduce administrative burdens.

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With a debt to disposable income ratio of 1.84, Canadian households are among the most indebted in the world and more vulnerable to rising rates given their higher exposure to variable-rate mortgages. Tony Stillo, director of Canada economics at Oxford Economics, said higher mortgage rates and the panic run-up in prices during the pandemic had kept the average cost of housing “35 per cent above the borrowing capacity of median income households.” But prices are expected to tumble a total of 17.5 per cent from their peak in a slowdown already well underway, according to a Reuters poll of market experts. Find out more.

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Today’s Posthaste was written by Noella Ovid, with additional reporting from The Canadian Press, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg.

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