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When Jennifer realized she was pregnant last summer, she called her family doctor’s office to make an appointment for a referral to an obstetrician. Having delivered her first daughter almost three years ago, she knew the drill. But when the secretary picked up and said that her physician had shut down her practice and left Toronto “to spend more time with her family,” Jennifer was stunned. It was the third doctor she’d lost since moving to the city in 1999—and every one of them was a woman who’d left for her children.

“I was pretty frustrated by the third time it happened,” says Jennifer (not her real name), a 36-year-old partner at a downtown law firm. Especially since this physician didn’t announce her departure, or try to find a replacement. Months went by and Jennifer phoned doctors’ offices posted online as accepting patients, only to find out they weren’t. She asked friends and colleagues for referrals, to no avail. Finally, in desperation, she went to the health clinic at her gym, which is only staffed with a doctor on Wednesdays. By the time she saw an obstetrician, Jennifer was in her second trimester.

“Before it was important to me to have a female physician,” she says. “I won’t be so fussy going forward.”

Jennifer’s situation is becoming increasingly common as more and more women pursue medical careers. And it’s the latest twist on what may be the country’s most critical health care issue—the doctor shortage. Across all health care occupations, from nurses to pharmacists to dental technicians, roughly 80 per cent of the workforce is female, according to Statistics Canada. But the physician population has always been male-dominated—67 per cent in 2007.

A radical change has begun. Fifty-two per cent of doctors under age 35 are now women. And the majority of students at nearly all of Canada’s 17 medical schools are female. At some, the number is huge—66 per cent at Université de Montreal, and 70 per cent at Université Laval in Quebec City. By 2015, women will make up 40 per cent of the total physician workforce. Peter Coyte, a professor of health economics at the University of Toronto, predicts this influx of women will contribute to a crisis in health care. “It’s going to have a profound impact on the gap between supply and demand,” he cautions. “It will get worse before it gets better.”

It’s been proven repeatedly—female doctors “will not work the same hours or have the same lifespan of contributions to the medical system as males,” says Dr. Brian Day, president of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA). Family duties are at least partly to blame. Day’s own wife and his sister-in-law, both trained physicians, haven’t practised since having kids 10 years ago. Despite their demanding careers, women are still “given the bigger proportion of child care, housekeeping and elder care,” says Dr. Janet Dollin, president of the Federation of Medical Women of Canada. But this pressure comes with a price. Burnout—the workplace exhaustion to which females are particularly susceptible—drives many women out of medicine altogether.

This is bad news for patients like Jennifer. Today, five million Canadians are without a family doctor. A 2005 survey found that just 23 per cent of Canadians were able to see a physician the same day they needed one—placing this country last among the six studied, including the U.S., Britain and Australia. Canada’s doctor-patient ratio is among the worst of any industrialized nation: with just 2.2 physicians per thousand people, it ranks 24th out of 28 OECD countries (well below the average of three). And among the G8 countries, Canada ranks dead last when it comes to physician supply.

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