Ontario doctors offer solutions to help address shortage of family physicians

For the third year in a row, there was a decline in the number of medical students who are seeking residency with family doctors, according to the Ontario Medical Association (OMA).

“The OMA is concerned about the declining number of medical students choosing family medicine,” OMA President Dr. Andrew Park told reporters on Tuesday.

The number of students who are looking at fields outside of family medicine is a growing issue, according to the OMA.

“Following the first round of this year’s match there were 108 unfilled family medicine spots out of a total of 560 in Ontario, up from 100 unclaimed spots last year,” Park said.

“That’s a sharp rise from 61 and 2022, 52 and 2021 and 30 and 2020.”

Park said the second round of entries is to be announced Thursday and that his organization will be keeping a close eye on them.

The OMA gathered a group of educators from medical schools across Ontario in an effort to explain some of the reasons students are choosing other fields of medicine to practice in and what some potential solutions could be.

The group that spoke on behalf of the OMA on Tuesday included Dr. Cathy Risdon from McMaster University, Dr. Gena Piliotis from Queen’s University, Dr. Azadeh Moaveni from the University of Toronto and Toronto Metropolitan University’s Dr. Jobin Varughese.

While a number of issues they spoke of were financial, the assembled doctors said that there were other factors that needed to be addressed as well, including forms.

“No one goes to medical school to fill out forms,” Park said. “Doctors want to care for their patients but the administrative work that is crept into medicine makes the field less about caring for people and more about paperwork.”

Moaveni said that, on average, the general