LETTER: Shuswap physician’s dismissal of need for doctors unconvincing
Published 4:00 pm Monday, January 12, 2026
Re: Training more doctors won’t solve British Columbia’s crisis in health care
It is meaningful for Dr. Warren bell, in his professional capacity, to speak to a question of nationwide concern: the health-care crisis.
Although he embarks upon addressing the issue from a stance were capitalism is viewed as a complicit major culprit…,there remains a wanting for convincing reasoning to further explain why more doctors won’t help serving more patients.
If, as is widely publicized, many people with pressing health needs – and woudl-be new patients – are often confronted with finding the service of a local family doctor to be non-available, why will not increasing the number of physicians afford much needed relief?
And if being put on hold for extensive lengths of time (sometimes years) for needed surgical treatments is not an uncommon experience, why cannot more specialists be accessible?
And if patients are waiting for hours in line – with the added discomfort of bearing pain from an injury or disorder – at the emergency section of their hospital (such as what happened in Edmonton, where an individual awaiting critical medical attention died after enduring an eight-hour delay), why would not increasing the availability of more professional medical staff onsite not mitigate such extensively acknowledged lack?
Dr. Bell seems to view physicians as being governed mainly by financial incentive. Surely there are many who enter the medical field to answer a genuine calling to serve as an effective medium for healing their fellow human beings – such as those who work with Doctors Without Borders.
There are capitalist countries which ave a better record of managing the above challenges then Canada (Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands such as). Why not look to their best practices as models to redress the strikingly needful here?
Bringing trained physicians onboard from other countries is also a viable option if there are not sufficient medical practitioners available here.
Alexander Lipkin,
Cellist
Read more: VIEWPOINT: Trainin
