Canada

The title is convoluted. It's more like "residency programs train doctors who move abroad rather than doctors who stay in Canada". Here's the relevant bits:

medical schools that run residency programs still find room for foreign nationals from countries like Oman, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — people who frequently have no intention of staying here to work over the long term.

All of this is done with Ottawa's blessing. The federal government has exempted medical schools from immigration laws that require Canadians get priority for a job.

Critics maintain that dismantling the foreign "visa trainee" program — which gives several hundred residency spots to non-Canadians — would free up positions so more homegrown doctors can work here in Canada and help chip away at the physician deficit.

And here's some context:

Federal data suggest Canada will be short some 44,000 doctors, including more than 30,000 family doctors and general practitioners, by 2028.

And here's the smoking gun:

These foreign nationals have benefactors that pay much more for medical residencies than the sums offered by provincial governments for Canadian residents.

That explains why the current system continues, Pawliuk said: foreign trainees are a cash cow for the medical schools that administer the residency program.

Sorry if I missed this in the article. But what is the reason we can't just expand the number of residents? It seems like the issue isn't foreign intrest taking the slot, but that there isn't enough slots to meet demand. Wich seems like a thing we should be able to fix.

I think the article falls short in its reasoning. Yes, I agree that Canadian IMGs should have priority over foreign IMGs, but where's the root of the problem? Why do we have so many Canadian international medical graduates in the first place?

The issue here is not so much with how residency programs rank candidates, and I'd very much like to see a source for Pawliuk's claim of IMGs paying for residencies, because CaRMS doesn't work like that, but more because of the lack of Canadian graduates in the first place. Canadian medical schools are extremely exclusive and use outdated evaluation practices to limit their intake to a number that has not increased much at all in the past decade, at least at my local university.

This exclusivity leads to Canadians who want to be doctors to seek medical training elsewhere, as the article mentions. This then makes them an IMG, and the system doesn't often distinguish between a Canadian or foreign IMG. It'd be up to the residency program itself to prioritize Canadians, but then you'd have to convince the ranking committee to select based on nationality rather than aptitude.

The question we should be asking is not, "why are there so many foreigners in Canadian residencies?" but rather, "why don't we have more Canadian graduates to fill our own residencies?"

Greedy fuckers