Doctors and Hospitals in Quebec ::: I have decades of experience with medical doctors. And hospitals. Both have removed a lot of my body parts over the years. ::: This is what I have learned about both. There are two kinds of doctors. One kind is an excellent diagnostician but no "bedside manners". I call them "Dr. Frosty". The other is kind, sympathetic, great "bedside manners" but a lousy diagnostician. The latter may be the doctor I'd want at my bedside, if I were dying. ::: It is really hard around here to find a doctor who possesses both great diagnostic skills and is "Dr. Warmth". ::: Then Medicare's wheels fell off as our finest of the fine doctors emigrated to the USA and other parts of Canada. ::: As to hospitals? There are two kinds of hospitals. One kind of hospital has fantastic doctors and lousy nursing staff. The other kind has fantastic nursing staff and doctors who seem to have graduated at the bottom of their classes in med schools. ::: The trick is to know who's who, and where they are ::: We have a critical shortage of both doctors and registered nurses here. In fact, we need here some 5,000 new registered nurses. It's that bad. There are some 400,000 thousand patients who are called "medical orphans" because they don't have a private doctor of their own. ::: We had a massive "brain drain" in the '80s that left gaping holes in the system. ::: The Governments at all levels did the rest of the damage and flattened the playing field to such an extent that doctors and nurses could make three times more than they were being paid here just by crossing the Borders, and they fled in droves. Twenty years later, about the time it takes to train all these professionals in their specialties, hospitals are overcrowded, doctors have set up private clinics which are overcrowded, nurses are under-educated, foreign doctors who've emigrated here are not allowed to practice because they don't meet Quebec "standards of practice" and are bagging groceries or driving taxis instead of being allowed to do what we so badly need. ::: Doctors in every field are simply not taking on new patients. Some have "opted out" of Medicare and have set up private clinics which are illegal here, but a blind eye answers to money. Money talks. ::: Montreal is in a hospital construction boom and currently building not one, but two new general hospitals that are going to be the size of New Hampshire by the looks of it. Makes me wonder. How are they going to staff these two state-of-the-art facilities by 2012 when they are both supposed to open? Haven't figured out yet how it is that nobody has asked that question. Beats me. :::