FTE, PT, Locums: what are your current/recent numbers?
Started by Pathological_Liar
Retired.
450-500 total cash comp
Zero hours/week of actual work
52 weeks pto/year
Locums job:
none
🥳
450-500 total cash comp
Zero hours/week of actual work
52 weeks pto/year
Locums job:
none
🥳
How many slides and specimens do you see per day in the locum job?
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Average about 25 cases/day at the locums job, mostly EMBs, appendices, etc.
There is for sure higher paying locums work out there, but I know the site well and like all the clinicians/lab staff.
Why do you think pathologists in Canada accept this arrangement?
This is my personal understanding. But in the past, pathologists were very underpaid and compensation was not uniform, some getting a lot (if you were part of private lab) and some getting little. Few decades back, the government stopped issuing private lab licenses and some labs amalgamated into the public system. This mostly stopped the fee per specimen system and vast majority of pathologists became employees on salary. The effort was aimed at making compensation more uniform to confer to the public system ideal.
Because of this arrangement, in most places the only employer of pathologists are public hospitals/health authorities. These are publicly funded and have set a uniform compensation level for pathologists. Therefore if you want to work in a certain city, your choice of employer is limited. Since salary level is set by provincial standard, there is minimal negotiation room. Funding increases are negotiated by provincial medical societies rather than individual groups, therefore it is unlikely that a certain specialty will receive outsized increases relative to other specialties. Again, the impetus for large salary raise seems to be scandals that highlight human resource issues. For example, recently severe shortage of family doctors in BC exposed by the media prompted the government to increase funding to family doctors such that their compensation increased from ~250K to 385K.
There were a few major incidents over the years that highlighted the poor condition and pay of pathologists so gradually salary were increased after each scandal. A lot of pathologists here are IMG from South Africa, middle east, India, UK etc. Relative to those countries, the pay here is higher, so they seem to be content. For example, a pathologist from UK said his salary in UK was about 100K GBP, which is 130K USD, so his Canadian salary is relatively generous.
Since most pathologists have adopted to this "employee" mindset, a lot of effort is spent on arguing that there is too much work, rather than arguing for increasing value for work done. Most of the negotiation effort focuses on increasing FTEs so each pathologist gets less work, but less effort is spent on getting each pathologist paid more for their increased workload. For example, when a provincial medical society negotiates pathologist pay, they often compare to neighboring provinces. Since in each province the pay is very similar (370-420K), there is no argument for one province to give outsized pay increase relative to its neighbor.
Sounds boneheaded.
America, welcome to the future.
Let me translate from Canadian: "They have no choice"
The canadien experience has a lot of similarities with what happening in the us market imo
Steady collapse of true MD owned and run pathology groups and more paths working as employed doc’s - less innovation, less motivation to work, more in fighting amongst pathologists to get out of doing work (esp in academia). I estimate > 90 % of paths are now employed.
Been coming for years and will become universal.
You will be an employee of a private equity or hospital. It's definitely coming for you if you aren't. Best thing you can do is go rural.
speaking of bans, what happened to LA? he was a staple on here for a long time.
Triple homicide or inappropriate coding.
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Ray Charles could have seen this coming 10 years ago. My partners and I sure as hell did. So did LA.
That's why you get side hustles. I ain't going down that route. If that is my only option I will bid adieu. You make a lot more money outside of medicine for sure.
This forum went to hell when the job market improved after things settled down after covid. No more flee pathology now posts. I wonder what happened to thrombus. He get caught up in January 6th?
His practice website is down and his LinkedIn profile is gone.
He's probably doing the smart thing and completely erasing his presence from social media
What kinds of side hustles: med/path-adjacent or completely unrelated?
Where (ish?)
I just finished residency and escaped fellowship. Making $100-150k less. Currently not even smelling 30 hours but probably because I’m new. Hard rural.
Who the hell is monitoring these forums closely enough to habitually ban LA and Thrombus (he was wrong tho)? Is it other pathologists? I have realized the field is largely full of leaf eaters, even in private practice, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised there are some hall monitor types lurking about.
In my area, those jobs can be had but more likely farther from big cities or if you are in a big city it’ll take you 5-7 years to get to that salary to get to partner. Big city private practices with high volume you can make that much at some practices but they are selective in who they choose or you will be working hard.
I talked to an old timer pathologist who probably did well in his career financially. He told me it was hard work (high volume hospital based practice). I’m sure he wasn’t working 30 hour weeks.
Doggy day care, tree cutting. You must not come on here on SDN frequently.
The people that I knew in my group as partners (13 or 14 over 25 yrs), with the exception of one, all worked what would be considered very “hard” today. However, all did very well ($700+ 30 years ago). All were hospital based with the exception of 2 guys who did only the Derm office work. We owned our own histo lab which processed everything for ~15 hospitals. We did everything except EM. Did not have a dedicated peds hospital in our stable. All our hospitals were one or two person shows. A number of us consistently did 10,000+ surgical/yr. Only a couple folks did “some” of their grossing. Had several PA’s at main histo lab. Toward my retirement, I was going in most saturdays or sundays.
I did some more digging online (see link below). A report from 2006 about shortage of pathologists in Newfoundland found that back then, while the salary of pathologists in BC was 200K-260K, a fee-for-service pathologist in BC could earn 2-3 times that amount (presumably 400-600K).
I presume that this arrangement became a point of contention and that's why the government phased out the FFS system and slowly increased the salary of pathologists to sooth their feelings. This is basically a "divide" between academic/large hospitals and "private" "community" labs. Nowadays the "private" lab in BC (aka CJ COADY AND ASSOCIATES) have been fully assimilated into the provincial grid and pays the uniform salary that's set by the government.
But as I mentioned, the increases allowed by government has lagged inflation. At this moment the family physicians in BC have negotiated a deal that would see them make 385K a year, but job ads for pathologists in BC advertises salary of 374K.
addendum:
I was curious about the CJ COADY ASSOCIATES and did some digging. Looks like it started in 1958 as a community based private laboratory unaffiliated with a hospital, but has eventually been bought out by LifeLabs, which is one of the few "private" labs still operating in Ontario.
Our History – LifeLabs
B.C. questions medical test firm takeover - Peace Arch News
Higher fees, less patient access among concerns raised by health minister
www.peacearchnews.com
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BTW, speaking of Newfoundland:I did some more digging online (see link below). A report from 2006 about shortage of pathologists in Newfoundland found that back then, while the salary of pathologists in BC was 200K-260K, a fee-for-service pathologist in BC could earn 2-3 times that amount (presumably 400-600K).
I presume that this arrangement became a point of contention and that's why the government phased out the FFS system and slowly increased the salary of pathologists to sooth their feelings. This is basically a "divide" between academic/large hospitals and "private" "community" labs. Nowadays the "private" lab in BC (aka CJ COADY AND ASSOCIATES) have been fully assimilated into the provincial grid and pays the uniform salary that's set by the government.
But as I mentioned, the increases allowed by government has lagged inflation. At this moment the family physicians in BC have negotiated a deal that would see them make 385K a year, but job ads for pathologists in BC advertises salary of 374K.
addendum:
I was curious about the CJ COADY ASSOCIATES and did some digging. Looks like it started in 1958 as a community based private laboratory unaffiliated with a hospital, but has eventually been bought out by LifeLabs, which is one of the few "private" labs still operating in Ontario.
Our History – LifeLabs
www.lifelabs.com
B.C. questions medical test firm takeover - Peace Arch News
Higher fees, less patient access among concerns raised by health minister
Dildo, Newfoundland and Labrador - Wikipedia
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