Pandemic stalls B.C. associate physician plan

B.C.'s remedy for bringing more foreign-trained doctors into the medical profession has been delayed, sidelining potential candidates and prolonging pressure on the province's health system, advocates say.

B.C.’s remedy for bringing more foreign-trained doctors into the medical profession has been delayed, sidelining potential candidates and prolonging pressure on the province’s health system, advocates say.

The Institute for Canadian Citizenship, which helps newcomers and people seeking citizenship, estimates there are thousands of foreign-trained doctors whose qualifications have allowed them to be fast-tracked to Canadian citizenship, but provincial regulators refuse to recognize their credentials.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia proposed the new role of associate physician in April 2020 to address the province’s health-care needs, allowing doctors who weren’t eligible for a full licence to work under physician supervision.

It said the plan would help address the doctor shortage, utilize the expertise of internationally trained physicians and provide more people with medical care.

But no doctor has yet received the title and the college says the pandemic is behind the delay because of the way it affected surgeries.

“This program was set to launch at the start of the pandemic, but most of the targeted areas were within the surgical disciplines and COVID sort of wiped out much of the surgical capacity, so we haven’t licensed any yet,” said Dr. Heidi Oetter, the registrar at the college.

“Once we can get the program up and running, I would think that we should be seeing dozens of them entering the health-care system in British Columbia.”

Dr. Harry Tabrizi, an ear, nose and throat surgeon who practised medicine for more than a decade in Iran before immigrating to Canada in 2012, works as a hearing instrument practitioner in Surrey. Despite his efforts to become accredited, he said he hadn’t heard of the associate physician role.