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What proportion of Canada's family physicians serves the rural population?
"The main objective of the 1997 National Family Physician Survey is to collect baseline information about the practice of family medicine in Canada....
"The 1997 National Family Physician Survey contains three major thematic areas: (1) practice profiles; (2) professional activities and (3) practice environment. Practice profile focuses on what family physicians do in their medical practice and other characteristics of their practice. This section includes questions on the types and settings of family practice, remuneration, on-call activities, hours worked and services and procedures performed. The professional activities section examines the kind of professional and related activities family physicians are involved in and the times spent in these activities. Practice environment refers to the kinds of communities in which family physicians work, the kind of population they serve, the problems they see in access to medical care in their communities and whether they plan to make changes to their practice in the near future....
"Another important purpose of the 1997 National Family Physician Survey was the collection of baseline data on the types of communities in which FPs practiced and their patient populations.
"Physician maldistribution is one of the most vexing issues facing health care planners and rural residents. The first step in addressing the issue of maldistribution is the collection of information on practice locations and the characteristics of their patient populations. To this end, the survey respondents were asked to indicate the postal codes of their practice locations. Using these postal codes, it was possible to convert them into longitude and latitude coordinates using the 1996 Statistic Canada postal code conversion.... Survey respondents were also asked to check off the patient populations they served. The results in relation to the geographic characteristics of patient populations are presented in the following table:
Proportions of Family Physicians Serving Patient
Populations with Various Geographic Characteristics
|
Patient
Population Served
|
%1
|
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Urban
|
36.9
(n=10,078) |
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Small
town
|
21.0
(n=5,744) |
|
Suburban
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20.8
(n=5,682) |
|
Rural
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13.7
(n=3,756) |
|
Inner
city
|
11.0
(n=3,000) |
|
Geographically isolated / Remote
|
4.3
(n=1,175) |
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Others
|
2.5
(n=695) |
Based on N=27,324
The combined percentage may exceed 100% as some respondents checked off more than one answer.
"Over 65% of family physicians (FPs) served an urban, suburban or inner city population. Eighteen percent of FPs looked after patients from rural or remote areas. These figures are consistent with what has been found in other physician workforce studies....
"Nine out of ten FPs mentioned only one patient population served, but 7.1% mentioned two types of patient population, and the rest mentioned at least three types of patient population."
From: Andrew Irvine and Raymond W. Pong (1998). The 1997 National Family Physician Survey: Summary Report. Sudbury, Ontario: Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research, Laurentian University
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