The Legault government now plans to train nearly 200 more doctors per year, by opening the floodgates for medical admissions to university this fall.
He thus wants to keep his promise, made in 2022, to recruit 660 new doctors by the end of his second mandate.
Starting with the start of the 2024-2025 school year, and for the next three years, a total of 1,165 positions will be open in the various faculties of medicine in the province.
Archive photo, Stevens LeBlanc
This is 196 more than at the start of the school year in 2022. The office of the Minister of Health and Social Services specifies that in 2018, before the CAQ came to power, registrations were capped at 830 positions per year .
The CAQ had already started to increase registrations, but the government is accelerating the pace with the new three-year policy adopted yesterday.
“The number of new registrations was determined by taking into account various factors, including the training capacity of medical faculties, the reorganization of the health and social services network and delocalized campus projects,” explains the firm in a press release, including The newspaper got a copy.
Shortage of doctors
The government hopes that by thus increasing the number of admissions, it will be able to respond more quickly to the shortage, which still deprives hundreds of thousands of Quebecers of a family doctor.
• Read also: 2.3 million Quebecers without a family doctor: “We are not assholes,” pleads a doctor who has just retired from the RAMQ at 69
About a third of the province’s doctors are over 60, according to the College of Physicians.
However, there is no guarantee that the increase in admissions will translate into more family doctors.
This spring, The newspaper reported that nearly a hundred positions had been shunned and left vacant by residents.
Nevertheless, the firm believes that new measures put in place to reduce paperwork and allow phased retirement, for example, are helping to make family medicine more attractive to students.
Do you have any information to share with us about this story?
Write to us at or call us directly at 1 800-63SCOOP.
