NOSM students performing well amid increased competition for residencies

The doctor in charge of educational programs at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine says its students are doing well amid increased competition for residencies.

So far, only one NOSM graduate has failed to land a residency since the school opened in 2005, said Dr. Catherine Cervin, the school's vice president, academic.   

Graduating MDs must complete residencies—two to six year periods of hands-on training, depending on the specialty—in order to practice as physicians. 

But last year, nearly 70 students who had completed med school failed to land one, and students and medical schools have been raising concerns lately about the growing number of students vying for fewer placements.

NOSM students have so far done well in the process that matches residencies with suitable candidates, Cervin said. 

"NOSM students are well trained. They get a lot of clinical experience during their undergraduate years at medical school, and also a higher proportion of NOSM students choose family medicine, and typically family medicine has been easier to match to than some other specialties," she said.

NOSM students have also earned residencies in more competitive fields such as dermatology and opthamology, she added. 

When it was asked whether NOSM's own residency programs were attracting more accomplished candidates as a result of the increased competition, Cervin said it was hard to say.

"Our family medicine program has matched very high quality residents over the last number of years," she said. "Our other residency programs also have been successful in matching high quality applicants to their programs."  

Cervin denies that NOSM is to blame for the residency shortage, despite the fact that its first cohort of graduates entered the matching system around the time that the ratio of students to residencies started to tighten up.

"NOSM was one part of the expansion of undergraduate medical education across Canada to meet the needs across Canada for physicians, so it certainly is not NOSM's fault that there are a higher number of unmatched students," she said.

Northern Ontario needs more residencies in order to meet the demand for physicians in the region, she said.

"We probably do need to train more family physicians, more pediatricians, more general internists, et cetera, because we are still underserved," she said.

"Even though NOSM has been doing a good job since we began, there is still more work to do because particularly our rural communities are underserved."

NOSM is hosting a health human resource summit with the northern Local Health Integration Networks this week to work on new strategies for recruiting and retaining the physicians needed in smaller and Indigenous communities, Cervin added.