Nearly 740 doctors, residents and medical students in Quebec are demanding the Canadian province abandon promises to raise their pay.
The reasons behind the extraordinary request from the doctors are complex and, in some cases, political. But a petition detailing their concerns appeared online in late February after several nurses in the province set off a discussion about the medical system by describing their working conditions, including an unmanageable number of patients and marathon shifts extended by mandatory overtime.
The doctors want the province to take money that would have been used to increase their incomes and give it to nurses and other health care workers who are dealing with issues such as pay cuts and crushing workloads.
"The system has to change -- it will not survive much longer," said Isabelle Leblanc, a family physician in Montreal who is one of the petition's organizers and a professor at McGill University. "For a long time the system has revolved around physicians and hospitals."
While Leblanc said she was gratified that 210 specialists were among the petitioners, the group looking to turn back raises remains a minority within Quebec's medical community. According to the Canadian Medical Association, the province has 20,254 doctors.
Leblanc's group, Medecins Quebecois Pour le Regime Public, first began demanding that its members' raises be used elsewhere in 2015.
She said nurses who recently described seemingly impossible workloads to the news media and on social media raised the doctors' current request to prominence and prompted a debate over compensation.
Like most of their counterparts in Canada, Quebec's doctors are not paid salaries but rather a fee for each service they perform. Because any individual doctor's income depends on how much she or he works and the complexity of the task, it can be difficult to compare incomes between provinces. But Leblanc acknowledged that two decades ago, Quebec sat near the bottom in Canada.
A series of negotiations involving the separate groups that represent family doctors and specialists and several governments have led to a series of raises. By one estimate, the incomes of specialist physicians in Quebec increased by 160,000 Canadian dollars between 2009 and 2016. On average they now earn 403,537 Canadian dollars a year, or about $315,000 a year, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.
A Section on 03/10/2018