A clinician’s view of public health care in Quebec

MJM: Please describe how your divide you practice on a week-to-week basis. Dr. Saba: I work about one week a month doing hospitalization at the Lachine Hospital in Montreal. I do another week of mixed hospitalization, either with intensive care or without intensive care. I do about two weeks a month altogether in practice at my clinic; I try to be in my office at least three weeks out of four, two to three days a week. I also work at the emergency room whenever they need me; I probably put in about six shifts a month. So I do a pretty wide spectrum of medical practice, which I find very interesting. MJM: What led you to pursue this kind of career? Dr. Saba: I had always worked a little bit in everything; at one point my practice leaned more toward office practice but then around 2000, when there was a big cry for doctors in emergency rooms, I answered the call and started working in rural areas part-time. I believe in the public system and I thought that if we're going to make the public system work, we have to participate in helping where the need is. Then about four years ago, my colleagues asked me to come to Lachine Hospital because there was a shortage of doctors. Then there was a push to downsize the hospital and turn it into a clinic, so I became president of the local chapter of physicians and took on a leadership role to fight to maintain it as a community hospital. That's what I've been doing recently. In the past, after graduating from the Faculty of Medicine at McGill University in 1980, like a lot of my colleagues, I left Quebec. I did my residency in internal medicine in the United States and stayed on to work there for several years. was the director of a community health project there. Working there, I realized that I really appreciated what Canada had. I decided in 1996 that I wanted to come back to Quebec and I've been here ever since. MJM: What originally prompted you to leave Quebec? Dr. Saba: Part of it was that when I first left Quebec, I felt that as an Anglophone I didn't really have a part in the society here. There was always political unrest; you never knew if Quebec would separate or not. I felt that …