Press Releases
Physician Recruitment Programs at Risk says Wilson
(September 17, 2009) Simcoe-Grey MPP Jim Wilson urged the McGuinty Liberals to cancel their plans to make changes to the Underserviced Area and Return of Service programs that help attract doctors to underserviced communities. Wilson introduced a petition against the changes today and also made the following statement in the Ontario Legislature:
Mr. Jim Wilson (Simcoe-Grey): I rise to bring to the attention of this
House a very serious issue concerning the government's proposed changes
to underserviced areas and return-of-service programs.
These are programs that help our communities attract doctors, and now
the McGuinty government wants to take that away through proposals that
will cause communities in my riding and across Ontario to lose the only
source of government funding that directly supports physician
recruitment.
The government's proposals will pit north against south and rural
against urban, and they will severely hamper doctor recruitment in most
of the province. What the government is proposing is a plan that would
use what they call a rurality index to determine whether a community
can access physician recruitment funding. The McGuinty government wants
us to believe that this new formula will somehow improve the situation
while completely ignoring a community's need for doctors.
In my riding, the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care acknowledges
that New Tecumseth, Essa and Adjala-Tosorontio have a shortage of 11
doctors, and yet the government wants to take away every single tool
that these communities have to attract new doctors to the area. The
situation is no different in Clearview, Wasaga Beach, Springwater,
Collingwood and throughout much of Ontario.
To quote Gary Ryan, the president of Stevenson Memorial Hospital in
Alliston, in a letter he sent to the minister, he says that doctors
"may well go to other provinces or the USA. This would create a further
loss of physicians in Ontario."
The proposed changes to the underserviced area and return-of-service
programs do nothing to help the one million Ontarians without a family
doctor, and the government should stop meddling with these programs.
