Central Peace-Notley MLA Todd Loewen says he supports the UCP’s plan to attract and retain doctors to rural Alberta.
Part of the province’s plan includes boosting on-call rates to more rural physicians and $6 million to support training of more medical students.
Loewen says these incentives will help the doctors along with the other benefits of living in rural Alberta.
“There’s lots of great things we have in rural Alberta that’s definitely attractive, but I think we need to have financial incentives there too for them. The government has a lot of different programs focused on recruiting doctors and bringing them here to rural Alberta, obviously one of those that we can do is make sure that they’re well paid for what they do.”
Loewen says the plan has been in works for some time and thinks there’s potential for some expansions to them.
“I like some of these ideas that we’re bringing forward and I hope that some of them we can expand on. Especially when it comes to education supplements for those that want to practice medicine in rural Alberta, those that graduate from our Alberta universities.”
Loewen adds that especially with the COVID-19 pandemic going on, supporting rural doctors in Alberta is a big priority for the government right now.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
