Doctors aren’t insulated from unemployment, a surprising new report to be released Thursday will show, as medical unemployment of specialists has hit double digit levels — more than twice as high as in the general population.

Sixteen per cent of newly trained specialists said they couldn’t find work when surveyed over a two-year period by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. This number was compared to a national unemployment rate of 7.1 per cent when the report was being prepared in late summer. In B.C., the number of unemployed specialists was slightly higher than the national average at 16.5 per cent.

The findings are counter-intuitive, given patient complaints about accessing timely care and surgery.

“Never in my medical career have I even heard of unemployed doctors, until now, so this comes as a real surprise,” said Dr. William Cunningham, president of the B.C. Medical Association. Cunningham has been practising medicine since 1986 and works in a hospital emergency department on Vancouver Island.

The report doesn’t address the issue of whether there are too many specialists for the Canadian health care system, in which operating room time and budgets are fixed. But it makes it clear that doctors are competing for resources, including operating rooms, hospital beds and money to pay their fees.

The report also pinpoints reasons why newly certified specialists are having trouble finding work: older doctors are delaying retirement; established surgeons are protecting their precious (often only one day a week) operating room time so young doctors aren’t getting the hospital/surgical positions they covet; and a lack of cohesion in medical resource planning and coordination between medical schools, governments and hospital or health care authorities.

As well, there are relatively new categories of health professionals encroaching on doctors’ territory, such as advanced practice nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants.

Respondents to the survey were graduates of Canada’s 17 medical schools and/or Canadian residency training programs in fields such as cardiac surgery, neurosurgery, nuclear medicine, ophthalmology, radiation oncology, urology, critical care, gastroenterology, general surgery, hematology and medical microbiology.

The report does not include data on family doctors.

While about one in five specialists or subspecialists said they are having challenges finding jobs, another 22 per cent of newly certified specialists said they are taking locum positions or other various part-time positions. Locums assume another doctor’s duties during holidays or extended absences. In the survey, 40 per cent said they weren’t happy they had to do that.

The report draws attention to the fact that more than half of the respondents said they hadn’t received any career counselling about the most promising job prospects while doing their training. They also complained that there are inadequate avenues for finding out where the jobs might be.

Cunningham said since taxpayers are largely sponsoring medical education, there should be a fix to the problem through better planning of medical human resource needs.

“We need a more robust national/provincial system and there’s a really great need for more career counselling,” he said.

Dr. Dave Snadden, associate dean of education at UBC medical school, said since the report is based on a survey with a response rate of about one-third (43 per cent in B.C.) of 4,233 doctors polled, it has to be seen as less than perfect from a research methodology perspective.

He defended UBC’s approach to matching residency training positions with community needs and noted that is one reason why UBC has been pushing for more and more family medicine residencies.

Those in medical schools now, or planning on going to medical school, should know there’s a great demand for specialists like psychiatrists, pediatricians and general internists, while there is less demand for specialists such as cardiac surgeons.

Sun Health Issues Reporter

pfayerman@vancouversun.com