Third year will erase rural medicine

My comment is about Dr Loh’s January column.¹ We have seen over the past 30 years the effect of lengthier training on primary care access—primary care access is diminished and patients flock to emergency departments for primary care. In the past, doctors who completed a 1-year internship would go on to perform locums or brief positions in communities to hone their skills and many would settle down in primary care and not go on to a Royal College specialty. The 2-year program aimed to better prepare doctors for practice but inadvertently reduced the number of people doing locums in rural areas. Rural medicine is now a dying profession. With an additional year of training, rural medicine will be annihilated.

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