Canadian ED Physicians Get Pay Raise
Posted by WhiteCoat on October 3, 2008
Money talksCanadian Health Ministers recently agreed to increase Manitoba ED physicians’ salary by 50% in order to prevent summer staffing shortages. Before the pay raise, there was speculation that a Winnipeg emergency department would have to close because of 100 unfilled shifts during July and August.
Now the average salary will increase to $300,000 with those working in more remote parts of Manitoba province earning almost $350,000. Plus – the docs will only have to work 1,400 hours per year.
Wow. $250/hour. That’s almost half of what a US lawyer makes.
Plus the medical school tuition rates are significantly less than those for medical schools in the US.
Plus medical malpractice costs in Canada are less than in the US.
Amazing what can be accomplished if you give people the proper incentives.
Now if I could only speak French …
Marc Bernard said
I’d worry more about having an adequate supply of bug spray than speaking French if you were to live in Manitoba. Mosquito season is not a nice time of year.
Kathy said
Yeah, no real French in Manitoba. But lots of WIDE OPEN SPACES…. Great if you are the outdoorsy type.
Elizabeth said
No, that’s almost half of what a big-city big-firm partner
bills, not what he takes home. The average salary for a US lawyer with 5-9 years of experience is less than $90k. And he’s generally working a hell of a lot more than 1400 hours.
ERP said
Holy Crap! That is more than what you would get for working in the middle of nowhere ER in West Virginia. Is this for ALL of Canada or just rural Manitoba? Do you have to be able to treat polar bears too?
Sandy T said
This is only Manitoba (and even as a Canadian myself I would be awfully reluctant to work in rural Manitoba – floods, freezing and polar bears!) And they do pay about 40% of that in income taxes.
pelican said
I’m an “allied health professional.” I just moved to Vancouver, BC from a large west coast city.
I cannot tell you how much better my quality of life at work is- it is like going back 30 years (or how I hear 30 years ago wistfully described by my older US colleagues).
My last clinic in the US: 9 docs of varying hours, 2 NPs, me. *1* RN for all of us. 2 admins (high turnover positions). NO social work support at all (would be incredibly helpful in my speciality).
My clinic here: 4 docs of varying hours. Me. *2* full-time RNs, with expertise in this field. 1 full-time dedicated social worker. 1 full-time dedicated secretary- but, since we aren’t burning obscene hours of admin time on insurance bullshit, she has time to do actual secretarial things- timely dictations! managing phone calls from patients!, and she’s been with the clinic forever so she functions as institutional memory.
I cannot tell you how much of a joy it is to go to work, and just do my job with my patients, without begging insurers for every little thing. And the patients- lovely, lovely, lovely patients. No one has given me any significant attitude in the last three months. Yes, my salary is a little lower, but when you factor in the cost savings on health insurance, excellent retirement benefits, maternity leave, child care, etc, it breaks pretty close to even and I can round my salary out with worker’s comp if I’d like.
And no, I don’t speak French beyond “hello/goodbye/thank you/I would like X alcoholic beverage, please.”
Come on up North, health care peeps, come on up North.
tutor said
My friends who are lawyers work an average of 1,400 hour in a quarter year. (Hell so, do I as tutor and sub. teacher!) And they make approximately $80,000 per year.
Charles Pergiel said
I wonder where the money came from. Oh, that’s right, nobody actually lives in Manitoba, so they don’t need any doctors. (Har-de-har, that’s a joke, son).
Canadian dollar is back to parity with the American dollar after having been worth substantially less for the better part of 50 years.
My conclusion is that the Canadian government actually has some say-so about how things are run in Canada. Unlike the US where the government is a circus act to keep people entertained while the real business of running the country has fallen into the hands of megalomaniacs.
SuperBadJack said
You can make that kinda money a lot of places.
You can get you close to $300/hr in a resort town in California.
Billy said
I live on Prince Edward Island. I don’t think the salaries for ER docs are anywhere close to that here.
Did I go into the wrong profession? $350K? That’s far too much.
rogue medic said
$350K Canadian. Since the Canadian Dollar is now back under 90 cents to the US Dollar and the tax rate is higher in Canada, you can assume that a lot of that is not getting to the doctor.
How do you determine what is too much?
Since they had to raise the pat to this level, what they were offering before was not enough. Of course, if you are qualified to perform the job and willing to work for less, maybe they would like to hear from you.
Curt Sampson said
I can’t resist.
Is this another evil of socialized medicine?
On the contrary, I think this is a good example of a “free market”.
If the government pays for everything and isn’t paying physicians enough to work in rural places, then either the population will gradually move to an area where there is more healthcare available, the population will continue to live in rural areas and have bad outcomes in emergencies, or the government will pay enough money to make it attractive for doctors to work in rural areas.
I bet if the pay was increased only 10%, that few physicians would have taken the opportunity.
NateRN said
350k?!? At 40% taxation?!? Why, at that rate, while living on median US family-of-four income (2008), it’d take over 15 months to pay off your under- and postgraduate debts! Who has that kind of time?