Thank you for that opportunity.
Now you're putting me on the spot. Of course, my mind just went totally blank.
I think I would just take the opportunity to really enforce how successful our organizations have been, even in these difficult climates. One concern I would raise again that I haven't dealt with too much is the physician retention and physician support issue. We've mainly focused and often focus on student recruitment and retention. We have not focused as much on physician retention, and I mean physician retention in remote, rural, and underserviced urban indigenous communities.
You mentioned one issue, which is the inability to pay market rates. Our students are graduating with among the highest debt loads because of our higher likelihood of living in poverty. It's an absolute myth that all of us have access to band funding, especially for the duration of medical training. We have new physicians with higher debt loads and generally higher family responsibilities, so asking them to go work in lower-paying jobs under those financial pressures is unrealistic. I think that is a key issue why we may not achieve one of our goals, which is to increase the number of indigenous doctors working in areas where there is a high proportion of indigenous patients.
Further, although we don't have definite studies, I can tell you anecdotally from my personal relationships across the country and in my term as president, we have a very high rate of burnout among our physicians. I think it is because of the very stressful and emotional nature of our type of work. We work in advocacy roles, in addition to providing just straight health care, advocating for not only our communities, but often for our family members, in a system that is extremely unfriendly to us.
We need to do more to support our physicians.