Latest news with #healthcareTraining
CBC
6 days ago
- Health
- CBC
Health P.E.I., McMaster University partner to fast-track international medical graduates
Health P.E.I. is collaborating with McMaster University in Ontario to help fast-track foreign-trained physicians become licenced work on the Island. The province will pay for up to four seats in the university's fellowship program, which will begin training doctors with international credentials this fall. McMaster is offering a course that is split into 13 blocks, with each block lasting four weeks. One of the training blocks will take place here on P.E.I. After the physician completes the program and is qualified to work, they are expected to practise in P.E.I. for at least a year. Health P.E.I.'s interim chief medical officer, Johan Viljoen, hopes they'll stay longer. "During that rotation, it's incumbent on us to demonstrate to them that the work environment is a very supportive one," he said. "They have the infrastructure around them to be successful as physicians and... it is a welcoming community where they can see themselves and their families come to settle." P.E.I.'s health-care system has been strained in recent years. In 2024, the province was ranked last in terms of access to care. The president of the Medical Society of P.E.I. said at the time that the province needs to focus on recruiting and retaining primary health providers. 'Worthwhile investment' A single seat in the McMaster fellowship will cost the P.E.I. government about $80,000, but Viljoen said it is a good investment. "The time and effort that goes into educating a physician on any kind of level... is costly because it is being done by highly trained, highly skilled individuals and within environments that are costly to maintain," he said. "There may be a bit of a sticker shock when you hear those numbers, but in the big scheme of things, that is a very worthwhile investment." Internal medicine... are the non-surgical backbones of any health-care system. - Johan Viljoen, Health P.E.I. This will be a "first-of-its-kind" collaboration in Canada, said Haroon Yousef, who runs the hospitalist fellowship program at McMaster. The program existed before, he said, but this is the first time the university has collaborated with a government agency. "They'd graduate and then we kind of scramble and see if we could find a place for them to fit," Yousef said. "This is much more structured and leads them towards a pathway of independent practice." This program will see students working in hospitals, but Yousef said internal medicine goes beyond the hospital. "If this individual is so inclined, they can branch out and offer their specialist service and consultations to family physicians as well," he said. "They don't have to be limited by the hospital, but I think initially that's where things will start." Internal medicine consists of a wide range of care, said Viljoen. "Some individuals may be general internal medicine, they literally cover the spectrum — heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, brain, you name it," he said. "Then there are individuals who will choose to do another fellowship... and they will either become a cardiologist or a neurologist, etc. So internal medicine along with the family medicine specialty, those are the non-surgical backbones of any health-care system."
RNZ News
25-05-2025
- Health
- RNZ News
Health NZ's elective surgery plan sees training shortfall warning
Photo: Unsplash / RNZ composite Outsourcing more elective surgeries will limit training opportunities for future surgeons, the Health Minister has been warned. Health New Zealand aimed to perform more than 30,000 elective surgeries in the 15 months to June 2026 in a bid to reduce waitlists, including by outsourcing thousands of more straightforward cases to private hospitals . Documents obtained by RNZ under the OIA show Health Minister Simeon Brown was told in March that outsourcing more elective operations to private hospitals will worsen training opportunities. "That's because outsourced procedures are usually of lower complexity, which often makes them suitable for training," Health NZ wrote in a briefing. Some doctors agree with the ministry's warning. Hawke's Bay head and neck surgeon Christopher Kennel, who worked in both the public and private sector, said his trainees were already missing out on learning, because the public sector only had the capacity to deal with the most severe cases. Outsourcing would only make it worse, he said. "The registrars are already having a biased training towards more complex cases. I don't know how people who go through training here are going to be prepared to function privately because they're not going to have the background to do common, but less urgent cases, because the public system is under-resourced." To mitigate this, Health NZ was exploring more national agreements to train more doctors in private hospitals, starting with radiology and pathology. Health NZ said significant work was underway to get an agreement for obstetrics and gynaecology, while briefing papers said otorhinolaryngology (ear, nose and throat) and plastic surgery could also be targeted. Health NZ was also considering making training a requirement of private hospitals' outsourcing contracts. This raised ethical and practical questions, Dr Kennel said. "If trainees are helping me earn money privately, then who's paying them? "Is it fair for the public side to pay them to operate with me privately when registrars could be seeing public patients in clinic instead? "The other thing is that on any given day when I'm operating privately, I might do a public contract case, and I might treat a privately insured patient. How does the registrar know how to schedule their day? Because if they're going to be with me for like 2 hours of a public contract case, what do they do when I'm operating on just a privately insured patient?" Auckland radiologist and Auckland University Faculty of Medicine associate professor Colleen Bergin said she wants to see details and assurances on how robust training systems in private hospitals would be. "There are systems in place in the public hospital, there's a structure. Everyone on that day is involved in teaching those students. But moving to a private system, there's no details on that kind of process." Orthopedics was the only surgical speciality currently allowed to train doctors in private hospitals nationally, as much of its work was ACC related and done privately. Health New Zealand said it also had training agreements with some specialities at a local level. New Zealand Orthopedics Association chief executive Andrea Pettett said the 16-month-old scheme was "working extremely well" and a "win-win". "All parties are very happy with the system. Our trainees are employed by the public hospital and they are released for one or two private runs. They go to the private hospital often with the public surgeon. And it's entirely up to the private surgeon whether they want to train them." She saw no issue with publicly-paid trainees working in private hospitals, as private surgeons were also giving up their time to teach. "Obviously in a perfect environment, our public hospitals would be better placed if they could do the full suite of acute and elective surgery, but they can't. So this is a pragmatic way to ensure that New Zealanders get access to elective surgery." Speciality Trainees of New Zealand president Jordan Tewhaiti-Smith, an obstetrics and gynaecology registrar, was involved in setting up a training agreement between private hospitals and the Royal Australasian College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. He expected a deal to be announced soon but there were some details that still needed to be worked through. "It's making sure we are medico-legally protected in those spaces because public registrars aren't employed by the private sector, so that's a grey area." Ultimately, allowing private hospitals to train public doctors was a "needs-must" situation, he said. "These are people that are going to be the future specialists of tomorrow and the people that are operating on you in 5-6 years time. If they aren't trained to a good standard because we've dropped the ball in the public sector then it comes at a cost to everyone. "Some people might snub their noses at the fact that we're supporting the private sector by outsourcing all these cases, but actually it's a much bigger lens that I think we should look through." The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons said it was speaking to private hospitals about training future surgeons, but ideally all training would happen in an appropriately resourced public health care system. In a statement, Health NZ said a pre-requisite of any agreement is that training in private hospitals would not compromise the public system. "We are working with the private sector towards common expectations for how medico-legal, quality and financial issues are managed, as well as with professional medical colleges and unions to build consensus," Health NZ Clinical Lead Planned Care Derek Sherwood said. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday
