Canada's doctors need to stop resisting change in health care by recognizing that other professionals can help fix the ailing system.

I write to you as grown-ups in a time of chaos. I begin by saying, sincerely, that I’m your ally. I’m distressed by your malaise.

I want you to have rewarding practices, work-life balance, good pay and great support. I want you at key decision-making tables. I want to lessen the burdens that create antibodies to practising full-service family medicine among so many graduates of family medicine programs.

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I’m baffled by your resistance to impending changes to the health-care system. Ontario wants to expand interdisciplinary primary health-care teams, recommended in every report for the past 40 years.

The Ontario Medical Association has drawn a line in the sand: teams are fine, but teams have captains and the captains must be doctors. There will be no messing with how doctors are paid. Primary care is our house; we will decide what others get to lead and do. It is all very 1950s.

Alberta has authorized independent nurse practitioner (NP) clinics. That offers hope to the 700,000 Albertans who don’t have a regular source of care. To the doctors of Alberta it is a desecration of the temple of medicine.

Why? NPs........

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