This is an email from my friend Dorota Nowodworski, a 3rd year Medical student at McGill University, on the situation she and her classmates are currently involved in… Medical students being used as pawns? Yeah, great idea. Unions and Governments are ridiculous. Check this out:
As written by Dorota:
I had a hard time entitling this email. other choices included:
‘not quite adventures in surgery’
or ‘the quebec government is mucking with my life’
or ’how i ended up in quebec city on a wednesday afternoon’
It all started a few months back when our health minister decided to implement the infamous law 37 which states that if you slow down your practice for any reason, you will be severely fined- or if you gather different groups (ie like residents and attendings) the same can happen (you’d think they were the members of the hells angels and rock machine) and not to mention salary caps that don’t even keep up with the rising cost of living let alone catch up on the 40% salary margin between quebec and all other canadian doctors.
so what has the union of specialists done? well, they’ve decided not to teach the students. pressure tactic extraordinaire. the gov’t subsidizes a lot of our education, and therefore if the students miss a year, the gov’t loses a lot of money.
having started surgery on monday, i have yet to see an OR because the anesthetists won’t put the patient to sleep if there is a student present, etc etc. this has already been the case in other medical schools across quebec- universite de montreal has been facing reduced teaching since early november, and just yesterday universite de laval’s students were kicked out of hospitals. OBYGYN has kicked out the students across the board because in addition to the other problems, they are plagued by the fact that the gov’t may not help them with their malpractice insurance- which has risen to some $35,000 a year. fees that docs have to pay are constantly increasing, whereas their pay is not.
it strikes me as unfair that a doctor- who worked hard for training, and who carries enormous workload and incredible responsibility, should be treated this way in our province. if the doctors aren’t treated better in quebec, they won’t stay. and the quality of health care here will just decline.
so how does quebec city figure in all this, you wonder? well, as i woke up at 5am this morning, i wouldn’t have been able to tell you, but things certainly can turn around in a heartbeat! late last night i got forwarded an email that there was an organized protest leaving from university of montreal to the national assembly in quebec city this morning at 8am. this morning i went to the hospital as usual, anxiously awaiting the outcome of a staff meeting that was to be held to decide once and for all st mary’s stance on the issue. we got to talking with our residents while rounding at 7, and they, too, are feeling frustrated as the docs are threating to not pass anyone’s royal college exam, meaning that they can’t finish their residency.. so i mentionned the protest and before i knew it, me and the two other students were on a big yellow school bus with a hundred u of m students heading to the province’s capital… who knew i was so political?!
in quebec city we protested for two and a half hours on the chilly capitol hill. i have to say there is a lot of solidarity amongst all the students, standing there freezing, wearing our white coats and stethoscopes and waving our signs. hopefully someone will listen. on the way back, we called one of our residents to find out the results of the meeting this morning- turns out we needn’t bother going in to work tomorrow. so i get to sleep in (yay!) but my future is now jeopardized (boo!)
how so? well, since surgery is a 4 week rotation instead of a 8 week rotation, the maximum days we can miss is 5– which wll basically be complete come friday… and with losing a core rotation, we will have to re-do it at some point, most likely meaning that we’ll lose an elective, making us less competitive for whatever specialty we decide upon in the future. and it would be impossible to bump everyone by one month since the canadian residency match has set deadlines that it follows. but then again that’s the future and we’re not there yet.
the one thing i would have appreciated from the FMSQ, whom i support, is a little heads up. if you are going to use the students as leverage, at least let us know.
in the meantime i guess i’ll have to fight for an education- haha.
Make sure to hug your favorite Med school student today. They’re gonna be saving your ass in a few years, but in the meantime they have to deal with this bulls*#t. Good luck gang.