Province says family doctors signing up for new pay model

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on March 26, 2025.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

The Alberta government says hundreds of family doctors have signed up for its new pay model which launches on April 1.

The program, announced in December and developed in partnership with the Alberta Medical Association, has met the required threshold of 500 doctors to enroll.

As of Monday, 789 family physicians had signed up to receive their compensation from the new model.

The province says the model ensures competitive payment for Alberta doctors and includes seveal incentives for increases. They include

Maintaining high panel numbers (minimum of 500 patients), which will incentivize panel growth and improve access to primary care for patients.

* Providing after-hours care to relieve pressure on emergency departments and urgent care centres.

* Enhancing team-based care, which will encourage developing integrated teams that may include family physicians, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, dietitians and pharmacists to provide patients with the best care possible.

* Adding efficiencies in clinical operations to simplify processes for both patients and health care providers.

“This new model will strengthen comprehensive, cradle-to-grave primary care. These practices are the foundation of our health care system. The model will help us to retain the family medicine specialists and rural generalists we already have and will go a long way toward attracting more to Alberta,” said AMA president Shelley Duggan in a statement.

A Memorandum of Understanding was entered into last year with the AMA to develop a new primary care physician compensation model and since then, the province has heard from doctors about their priorities. Those include a pay model that recognizes the work they do to provide comprehensive care indirectly, especially complex patients with chronic illness because the current fee-for-service model doesn’t reflect that, said Premier Danielle Smith in December.

“We are confident that this new model will help build healthier communities and dramatically improve our ability to recruit and retain primary care physicians,” Smith said when the new pay model was announced.

“Recruitment and retention of family physicians is a nation-wide challenge and here in Alberta we think a big part of the solution is fair compensation and incentives that make sense,” she added.

The province is also making changes to the Alberta International Medical Graduate Program “to better support “Albertans who are studying medicine abroad and help them complete their residency in Alberta. The program assesses the qualifications of Alberta international medical graduates (IMGs) to determine their eligibility for medical residency positions at the University of Alberta and University of Calgary, but it does not select who is chosen for a residency position.”

The province says the changes will adjust the graduation deadline and remove a requirement for an externship assessment which required Alberta international medical graduates to complete a clinical assessment period in the province before starting their residencies.

For the 2026, application cycle, if applicants graduate by July 1 of next year they will be eligible. Previously, they would have had to graduate by Dec. 31 of 2025.