What is the landscape of health care look like in your rural Alberta community? RPAP’s Research and Analysis team have crunched the numbers, and are pleased to present the Landscape of Rural Health interactive dashboard for your information.
This dashboard provides information as it pertains to physician attraction and retention within Alberta communities. This dashboard presents an outlook on the physician supply in Alberta in July 2015, based on information provided by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta.
For ease of use, the information presented has been grouped, according to Alberta’s federal electoral districts as of the 2012 federal election, into the following categories:
- Physician Cohort: these figures give you an exact count of the number of physicians in the selected districts.
- Physician per 100,000 Inhabitants: these figures give you an estimate of the number of physicians for each 100,000 people living in the selected districts. The population number are extrapolated from previous censuses done by Statistics Canada
- Average Physician Age (est.): these figures give you an estimate of the average age of the physician cohort for the selected districts.
- Distribution of Physician Cohort by Age: these figures allow you to see how the breakdown of the physician cohort by age. This is important to identify potential future issues with the physician workforce due to retirement or difficulties in training future physicians in these areas.
- 5-Year Physician Retention Rate (est.): these figures show the percentage of physicians who stayed in the district over the past 5 years. For instance, if in 2010 the cohort consisted in 100 physicians, and among these 85 were still present in 2015, the 5-year retention rate would be of 85%.
- Origin of 2015 Physician Cohort (Over 5 Years): these figures give the breakdown of the district’s current cohort by geographic location 5 year ago. Thus, physician currently practicing could have been retained (already present 5 years ago), be new registrants in Alberta (newly trained physicians or newcomers to the Province), or originate from either another urban or rural district.
- Percentage of International Medical Graduates in Newcomers (5 Yrs.): these figures show the importance of physicians who have obtained their medical degree from universities outside of Canada among the new physicians in the selected districts.
- Percentage of International Medical Graduates in Physician Cohort: these figures show the importance of physicians who have obtained their medical degree from universities outside of Canada among the whole physician cohort in the selected districts.
Watch for future dashboards to be added to the Landscape of Rural Health, exploring the data that illustrates the impact of healthcare in rural Alberta communities.
As we are an organization working for Albertans, RPAP invites all stakeholders with interests in research findings or research proposals related to rural healthcare, or if you have questions, please contact RPAP’s Research and Analysis department at researchandanalysis@rpap.ab.ca.