Quote:
Originally Posted by Truenorth00
Pay data was the average for all GPs. Not just NHS. Do their private sector GPs get pensions too? NHS GPs are supposedly between £69-105k. So their pension is not putting them higher than the average Canadian physician.
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This is not an apples-apples comparison. The NHS pays very well once you've made it past being a junior doctor, in most cases better than Canada. Salaries doctors make less on paper in the NHS, but have actual benefits including a pension and do not have to run a business. For the most part, this is not an option in Canada. With that being said, the majority of GPs in the UK are not salaried and make more than their Canadian counterparts.
The GP salary you quoted of 70k GBP (120k CAD) in the NHS is base pay for employed GPs working 37.5 hours a week, which includes time for administrative duties. They typically only spend 3 days a week seeing patients during that time. Most Canadian physicians would consider this part-time work. Obviously most GPs in the NHS work more than 37.5 hours, and their income increases because of this. The average earnings of a salaried GP in the NHS was 101k GBP, which is 175k CAD. They receive benefits on top of this, including a pension. They also do not have the responsibilities of operating a business. Regardless, the majority of GPs do not work under this model in the UK.
Source.
Almost all Canadian GPs are self employed contractors that operate their own small businesses. They average about 48 hours/week (55hours/week when including on-call duties ) and earn $308k CAD before overhead expenses (which amount to around 27%). Take home is $220k but with no benefits and they also have to allocate time and energy to running a business.
A better comparison to Canada would be a contractor GP in the UK, who operate as self employed physicians in a similar manner to Canadian doctors. Their gross pay is around 500k GBP (867 CAD). Overhead is substantially higher (~60%), but take home is still about 150k GBP (~260k CAD). This is about $40k CAD more than a Canadian family doctor doing the same job. About 60% of British GPs are working as contractors. Sources
this, there, and
that.
The other example is Australia, where they also have a public/private system. A full time GP works on average 7 sessions a week in Australia. Each session is a half day, so this amounts to about 3.5 days a week. The average gross income for a
GP in Australia $365k AUD (330k CAD). Overhead is about 30%, similar to Canada. Take home works out to about $10k CAD a year more than what Canadian GPs earn.
The US is also very open to FMGs and clearly does not have a sole payer public system. GPs are predominantly salaried there and usually make around $200-$300k USD a year before benefits. Source: conversations with colleagues, but easily verified with a quick google search.
There really is no evidence that bringing in more private pay will reduce doctor's salaries, or that opening the "flood gates" to foreign medical grads (FMGs) would amount to anything. In fact, there aren't even any flood gates. The Canadian system is already heavily reliant on FMGs and we try to license as many of them as we can. I've posted this many times before, but proportionately there are more foreign trained doctors practicing in this country than there are foreign born people (pre-JT international student surge obviously). A lot of them came from the UK, but the appeal of Canada was not the higher income. It was the low cost of living and cheap cost of housing. This is obviously not as big of an attraction now. The other big group were trained in South Africa and India, but honestly the latter group is often problematic and you wonder how they got to practice here. Anyways, the problem of the Indian neurosurgeon driving a taxi cab in Toronto is a trope as old as I am, but was always greatly overexaggerated. If it was ever true, there was something very wrong with him. Getting licensed in a new jurisdiction is a pain in the ass, but we do it all the time for foreigners. This is a low hanging fruit that has had its tree picked bare many times over by now, but continues to get attention because of special interest groups - namely, Canadians who did not qualify for medical school locally and are now trying to come back to publicly subsidized residency programs after completing medical schools at expensive but shady schools in the Caribbean or in eastern Europe.