Saskatchewan, like everywhere else dealing with the demographic curve of
the baby-boomers (the bulge in the middle of the the population pyramid concept)
is seeking more doctors, nurses, & health care providers of all stripes.
We (as a nation) do not produce enough, & thus we strike out to find this shortfall
in other directions like India or Cuba that produce more doctors than they can use
domestically.
I can't speak for the structure of the training for doctors, but I do know a bit about
the structure for training nurses here in Saskatchewan. At one point, it was a two
year training program to produce a nurse, who graduated with a two year student
debt and was thrust green into the system to be taken under the wing of experienced
nurses.
Now it's a four year training program (two of those years being training to be a nurse,
and the other two of those years being training in administration) graduating a green
nurse with a four year student debt who now come out with a lower number of
experienced nurses (baby-boomers retiring) to take them under their wings to turn
these graduates into experiences nurses.
With now more than double the student debt, more nurses try to get into administration
(& a higher wage) to clear their debt. With the program now being four years long
instead of two, we can only produce half of the number of nurses we once could in
the same time frame, and this isn't enough to replace the nurses that are retiring.
The new nurses graduating now out of the four year program don't know anything
more about nursing that they would have in the two year program, but they all know
a whole lot about administration.
This isn't a Saskatchewan only issue, and thus the recruitment efforts by everyone
everywhere to hire health care providers form other jurisdictions, be they other
regions in a province, or other provinces, or states, or countries, etc...
Many doctors come to Canada, and end up as Nurses Aides, or Taxi Drivers, etc...
for the time (& it might be years) it takes to receive certification here in Canada.
That's not helping the issue either.
