Letter to the editor.

Medical school "urgently" required

For the past 10 years, I have had the privilege of acting as the program director for the Northeastern Ontario Family Medicine Program and I have visited medical teaching practices across Northern Ontario. Graduating medical students must complete two years of clinical training known as "residency" before they can open their own family practice. Specialists require four to six years of residency training.

Currently 16 students per year enter the northeastern residency program. Every year about 100 to 140 students from across Canada apply to our rural, community based program. The competition is intense.

I am impressed with the quality of education provided by our northern "teaching" physicians. Despite staggering workloads, our northern family doctors and specialists who teach manage to achieve learner satisfaction levels that often exceed scores obtained by their fellow faculty members in southern centres.

About 73 per cent of our graduates set up practices in smaller remote or rural northern towns that were near to or exactly where they trained.

Can it actually be? Do some of our best and brightest physicians choose to work in underserviced areas? Areas that have no quick "back up" and where doctors are expected to deal with a wide scope of complex problems never faced by big city "downtown" physicians in the south? Yes they do...and, we desperately need more of them!

For the past three years, I have served as chairperson of the Northern Ontario Committee of the Council of Ontario Faculties of Medicine. The following reality has hit home -- Ontario and Canada face a crisis in the number of physicians required to meet our needs.

Canada is graduating fewer physicians than the number who are retiring each year. In some specialties, such as general surgery, the average age of the surgeons in Ontario is about 64...