Although some of the incentive programs, on-call compensation and acknowledgment of the special and extensive skills needed by a rural physician have started to make an impression in eastern Canada, the problems of recruitment and retention are worsening in the west. The reduced level of service previously provided is diminishing. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that the larger numbers of women now graduating from medicine have shunned rural practice, so that the undersupply of women in rural practice is greater than that of men. This was heavy enough to force many women out of rural practice and makes rural practice a hard sell to female medical students. Merely surviving is not a sustainable lifestyle.
Rural women are a practical lot and are grateful if they can get any medical care.
For them, there is little use in preferring a female doctor if it means money and time they can ill afford on a trip to the city. In my experience, the urban woman who has moved to a rural area wants and will seek the level of service to which she has been accustomed in the urban setting. But the rural woman wants to stay in her community for medical care. Concentrating services in urban areas does not make them available to rural women. The preference of women, especially younger women, for female doctors has implications for future health care, especially in rural and remote communities.