Crisis? What crisis?

A friend told me recently that he is suffering from crisis fatigue. Open an issue of just about any medical journal , he said, and you will find at least one article warning of an impending critical shortage of professionals. This issue of JOGC is no exception; on page 598, the Maternal Fetal Medicine Committee of the SOGC draws our attention—quite correctly—to the looming MFM shortage in this country. 1 Unfortunately, the MFM sub-specialists are not alone in facing potential shortages. Over the past couple of years, we have become increasingly aware of shortages of other sub-specialists (oncologists, urogynaecologists, and REI subspecialists), with no evidence that these shortages will resolve. The SOGC has repeatedly drawn our attention to the now inevitable shortage of maternity care providers and to Canada's decline in standing among OECD countries in rates of infant and maternal mortality. The growing shortage of maternity care providers is not limited to Canada, although in Australia and in the United Kingdom a broader role for midwife care has allowed those countries to focus on providing women with the maternity care they want, rather than on providing maternity care in any form. In Canada, it is likely maternity care providers will soon hit the wall. But they may hit the wall with a thud that is muffled by the cries from other disciplines within our specialty. The cries to relieve professional shortages have become so raucous that we are in danger of becoming desensitized. We may begin to feel that if we can't fix all of these shortages, then we shouldn't try to fix any of them, and we will simply have to learn to make do with fewer resources. After all, we've been doing that for some time now. But should we? There is another potential risk of having so many calls for help with shortages. In our frenzied attempts to gain public and political sympathy, we start to pit one segment of the profession against another, and interdisciplinary bitterness develops. Exacerbated by fee schedules that favour first one segment of practice, then another, interdisciplinary bitterness is heightened by income envy. Departments of obstetrics and gynaecology without overall income parity become houses divided. These outcomes simply will not do. As I see it, we can do two things in attempting to deal with the fallout from these shortages. First, we can use our joint strengths and make our own …