Manitoba fulfils promises to doctors, including $13M for fees

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This article was published 11/05/2023 (852 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Manitoba government has made good on its promise to reimburse licensure fees to physicians, six months after announcing it would help them out.

“I’m pleased to see this incentive has come to fruition,” Health Minister Audrey Gordon said Thursday. The licensure fees will be reimbursed for the next two years at an estimated cost of $13 million, she said.

The government is spending $350,000 to provide all doctors with access to a secure messaging platform called Cortext to help them and care team members connect and collaborate in real-time to make diagnostic and treatment decisions faster.

It is to be rolled out this month.

“We are healing health care by supporting and retaining hard-working physicians in Manitoba’s health-care system,” Gordon said. “This announcement is part of a broader overall commitment to retain, recruit and train health-care providers and improve their working environment.”

The head of Doctors Manitoba said she appreciates the government has followed through on some of its initiatives.

“The supports announced today are part of a bigger group of actions we hope will help retain more doctors in Manitoba, which couldn’t be more important when our most recent data suggests (more than half) of physicians are considering retiring, leaving Manitoba or reducing their clinical hours,” Dr. Candace Bradshaw said Thursday in an email.

Doctors Manitoba’s own survey of physicians this year received 1,121 responses, representing more than one-third of practising physicians. It found 14 per cent are considering leaving Manitoba to practise elsewhere, 12 per cent are considering retiring, and 26 per cent are considering reducing their clinical hours of practice.

“We are now looking for the government to fulfil the last piece of its action plan for doctors, and that’s a practice stabilization support payment, which has tremendous potential to retain the doctors we have and recruit more to Manitoba,” said Bradshaw.

“Other provinces have made similar moves, and we want to ensure Manitoba isn’t an outlier in the middle of an international physician shortage,” she said.

Gordon said since November, when the health human resource action plan was announced, the province has hired 73 physicians.

She has not said where they work or how many physicians stopped working during that same time.

The Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba isn’t sure, either.

For the period of Nov. 1 to April 30, 18 Manitoba physicians retired, while 41 new physicians were registered.

However, that number only represents new registrations in Manitoba regardless of who hired the physicians and where they may practise, spokesperson Wendy Elias-Gagnon said in an email.

“We do not know how many are still practising but may have decreased their workload and we do not have data available for physicians who left the province,” she said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca