Strategy key to dealing with doctor shortage
By Lethbridge Herald on October 4, 2025.
Alexandra Noad
Lethbridge Herald
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
A physician and professor at the University of Calgary who previously held a leadership role in Alberta Health Services says solving the provincial doctor shortage is more complex than simply hiring more doctors.
Braden Manns, professor at Cummings School of Medicine, has spent the last four years analyzing 16 years of data to find the root cause for the physician shortage in Alberta.
What he found was a trickle-down effect of a growing population of aging Albertans, compounded by an increasing number of people with chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and mental health disorders.
Manns says his findings showed that family physicians have increased by 40 per cent, but they are often working in hospital settings. Those who are working in clinics are seeing 10 per cent fewer patients than they did 20 years ago.
Manns believes the reason for the decline in patients is because patients often have multiple chronic conditions, causing doctors to spend more time with them.
“I’m a kidney doctor and there’s people with one or two health complications, including kidney disease, and then people that have six or seven (health complications) and those people I need to spend a lot longer with, and it means I can’t see as many people in the day.”
He believes the solution to the physician shortage is to focus on creating primary care networks, which allow for other health care professionals such as nurses, nurse practitioners, physiotherapists, social workers and others, to deliver services. That would reduce the amount of care primary physicians are required to provide while allowing them to focus on the more complicated issues other clinicians aren’t able to address.
Manns says, with an aging population, there needs to be a long-term, sustainable plan which should include training local doctors, as Alberta saw an 11 per cent increase of doctors trained in low- and middle-income countries between 2004 and 2020.
He also believes that nurses and doctors should be trained together, so they can learn to work together while they are training, not after they have completed their training separately.
“We don’t train doctors and nurses together; we just kind of force them together after they’ve finished their training and hope they can work it out.”
Having an overarching planning to connect the various entities of health care, including physicians, would help create a system which runs smoother both on local and provincial levels.
“There needs to be the local implementation of the plan, but there needs to be some elements that are planned provincially and we need doctors as part of the system, not sitting outside thee system as contractors.”
With doctors currently on contracts, Manns says some of them do feel like they might have solutions with no say. They do have autonomy over some things, such as their work schedule, but Manns feels there should be a solution with a happy medium of supporting doctors while also giving the system a little bit more influence in how they work.
“I know (physicians) would not want to sign up as employees, but there are arrangements where they could be embedded in the system a bit more, where they would have a little bit more influence on how and where they worked and it would also allow physicians to get a bit more support.”
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Some very good points! Thank you!
We as a society must also try to help, because these shortages are across North America: shortages in all sectors, teachers, trades, engineers, truck drivers, bakers, etc., due to baby boomers retiring. They were aware of this over 25 years ago, but no one prepared.
You also cannot just through a bunch of money at a problem and solve it . . . we have seen this fail over and over again! How many services and supports are you willing to give up? There are only so many tax dollars to pay all of the bills and unlike what many believe, money just does not fall from the sky like rain! There must be fiscal responsibility.
Too many radical societal issues have been intermingled with these vital services as well, which stem from societal family issues which the healthcare system and teachers have to be trained to deal with, that should never be a factor. One example is the ‘furries’ . . . kids whose parents have allowed them to grow up believing they are not human, but an animal: a cat, dog, squirrel . . . really??? These professions should never have had to deal with kids/young teenagers who act in this manner and that starts in the home. We have added so many stressors on this vital people who work in these professions because we have failed to take responsibility for our families in the home, in many cases. We need to do better!
We must learn to work smarter, more effecient and the public must stop running to emergency rooms just because the have fever and sniffles that over the counter meds will treat. There are many who abuse the system, putting stress on an already stretched thin system.
We have got to stop fighting against each other, and work together to solve these issues!
Whether it is healthcare, teaching, or any other necessary service, we must all stop trying to tear down governments, go on strikes, and tell the unions precisely what is needed, exactly what ideas might help improve their very heavy workloads and focus on solutions.
Politics should not be a factor!!!! No governing party has the magic answer and no political party can magically wave a magic want and fill all the positions needed to reduce stress on the system.
But what angers me is when a party tries to spread disinformation and misinformation about the governing party, not to help the healthcare issues or teachers issues, but for their own political gain, in an effort to tear down the government or gain support in the next election so they can gain power! They will not be able to do better!
We must focus on solutions, not rebellions!
Back in the 60’s and 70’s the Japanese were trying to dig out of the impacts that devastated their country in World War II. They focus on unity, working with their employees, management had lunch with the workers listening to concerns, regular meetings were held to here how they could improve the production and quality and they brought in an expert designer or producer from other major similar industries, one I remember was one of the elite engineers from Mercedes, and soon after, they had some of the best quality, reasonably priced vehicles, and took large sections of the world market for their cameras, musical instruments, and many other products.
They achieved this by working together!
No government will give you everything you want, will be able to solve the lack of staffing in all sectors, or instantly solve the healhcare issues or teachers issues! None!
The world is facing some troubled times! Canada will is facing troubled times and we will only magnify the issues if we tear each other down in the process.
Some very good points were made in this report and the people, the workers, the unions have to all start being reasonable, truthful, and willing to work to find solutions, and the government will need to acknowledge those efforts and realize there may be merit to some of those solutions.
No one political party can solve the issues and instead of trying to find ways to tear down a government or discredit the other parties we should be finding ways to solve the serious issues we face! A great deal of time is spent finding dirt on other parties and spreading questionable information and just think if that time was spent trying to find effective solutions that would help instead of hinder.
Doctor shortage is not complex as they make it out to be. We have plenty of qualified doctors. The problem is, the exam process. I guess only so many exams are allowed to be doled out per year, making the wait list long. I have spoken to a doctor at the LRH and this is what he says, a lot of doctors, but way too much red tape. His idea is to get these doctors fast tracked much quicker by giving them the position while learning the Canadian way of doing things. This way, they work, can experience, and more confident taking the test, which they would take in 2 to 3 years. Then, give them the incentive to stay here, whether forgiving their school debt or lower property tax for a time. The solution is simple, the red tape makes it near impossible.