Physician supply

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 43, No. 1, January February 2001, Page 10 Letters
By: Alex Porzecanski, MD

I am adding to the letters published in your November 2000 issue [BCMJ 2000;42(9):413] regarding the physician supply issue and how best to deal with it.

One of the solutions proposes more residency positions to match the number of medical students graduating from UBC, that number being 120. The next letter proposes to re-install the rotating internship year, to help budding physicians make an informed decision as to which specialty they should train into.

I would like to propose in addition bringing back from abroad (Ireland, UK, and Australia) those of our children who are studying medicine there, victims of the medical school enrollment cuts of the 1994 era. With increased residency positions over all Canada, not just in BC, we have then more room to train our own Canadian foreign graduates and assure them that we want and need them back home. At the present time, we are losing them to the US, as we cannot take them on to offer them residency training.

As well, with the re-establishment of the rotating internship, what better way to assess the competency of those non-Canadian foreign graduates that are already in this country and who have very limited entry into the system, if at all, under the present circumstances? This would be a very good way to proctor and monitor their performance, let them upgrade their language skills, and at the same time adapt to our ways and medical practice routines. At the same time, they would provide a ready force of physicians available, with many already trained in their home country, and just needing to be recognized here.

—Alex Porzecanski, MD
Victoria

Alex Porzecanski, MD. Physician supply. BCMJ, Vol. 43, No. 1, January, February, 2001, Page(s) 10 - Letters.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply