President's Letter March 09

March 13, 2009.

Dear Section Members,

Recently you have received a package in the mail from the BCMA regarding the proposed agreement between the BCMA. Many members have contacted me asking whether hospitalists should support this agreement.

In this agreement, hospitalists, as all other physicians will be eligible for significant increased contributions to their CPRSP plan. The increase should substantially increase the yearly matching contribution you are eligible for. The CME money you are eligible for will also increase significantly.

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There will be a baseline 0.5% per year increase to APP compensation rates in each of the next two years. In addition, there is a significant amount of money allocated to salary and service contract physicians to further increase salary rates and ranges. The Section of Hospital medicine will formally apply to the Alternate Payments Committee (APC) for a share of this money.  We are aware of the significant recruitment and retention challenges facing Hospitailst programs and will present the strongest argument to allocate the necessary resources to help support the sustainability of these programs.

In addition to these monetary benefits, the agreement commits to a process for developing a model for comparing compensation levels for physicians in BC, Alberta, and Ontario. This model will be used in future negotiations. We believe that this could bring significant benefits to BC hospitalists as we are comparatively low on the pay scale compared to hospitalists in Alberta and Ontario.

The executive of the BC Section of Hospital Medicine has reviewed and discussed the proposed agreement thoroughly. The executive believes that given the current economic and political climate, the BCMA negotiations team, in coming to this agreement has achieved some significant gains for all physicians including hospitalists. The unanimous decision of the executive is to recommend that the hospitalists support this proposal in the referendum.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Dr. Rod Tukker,  President BCMA Section of Hospital Medicine