U. S. doctors moving northPhoto: DARREN STONE, TIMES COLONIST Internist Dr.
Robert Beck, at the Royal Jubilee Hospital. Beck hosts a podcast called The Interesting MD where he explores the differences between the Canadian and U. S.
health-care systems and aspects of navigating a move to Canada. Of all the books oncologist Kira MacDougall has collected, her favourite is her Canadian passport — it’s allowed her to track gorillas and scale Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, scuba dive in Iceland, and climb glaciers in Ecuador. And now, after more than a decade working abroad, most recently in New Mexico, that passport has brought her back to Canada, where she started work at Royal Jubilee Hospital on April 1.
The 33-year-old quit her job in January at a community clinic in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and, with her partner, 35-year-old firefighter Miles Kehr, drove their fully equipped 22-foot Ford Transit van to Vancouver Island, arriving last month. The move was inspired by fellow physicians who sent news stories about the province’s new fast-tracked process for U. S.
-credential recognition and a public relations campaign on the benefits of working in B. C. MacDougall, who grew up in Hampton, Ont.
, but whose parents now live on Vancouver Island, said she started the process shortly after learning it was an option, and found the changes have made it “significantly easier and streamlined compared to how it was. ” Since the province launched a campaign in March 2025 to recruit health-care workers from the U. S.
, just over 2,000 have applied for jobs with the province’s health authorities, and 500 have been hired — nearly 100 in just the last month, Premier David Eby said this past week. That includes 109 doctors in 25 different specialties, about 25 family doctors, 315 nurses, 51 nurse practitioners and 29 other health professionals. MacDougall, who did her undergraduate studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
, and went to medical school at the American University of the Caribbean in Saint Martin, has worked in New York, California, Oklahoma, Florida and Louisiana since she graduated. She said she always wanted to return to Canada one day. But when the rules changed in July 2025, and her training and licence were recognized in B.
C. , she decided the time was right. Moving to Victoria allows her to both maintain the work-life balance she wants — hiking, cycling, scuba diving, climbing, running — and to focus on lung and gastrointestinal cancers.
In the U. S. , she was practising general oncology, seeing all types of patients with cancer.
“This will allow me to really dive into the literature and become familiar with several specialties within oncology,” said MacDougall, whose clinical research includes co-authoring 21 peer-reviewed articles. “There are a lot of advancements in oncology right now, better patient outcomes, more patients are being cured now than ever before. ” How and why doctors working in the U.
S. end up moving to Canada — and what they find when they get here — is the focus of a podcast called The Interesting MD by Robert Beck, a 47-year-old U. S.
internist who came to work in Victoria in December 2020 with his wife Andrea Beck, also an internist. His podcast explores the differences between the Canadian and U. S.
health-care systems, as well as issues around navigating the move, from immigration rules to tax implications. He said many of the problems in the health-care systems in the U. S.
and Canada — such as staff shortages — are the same. Others are unique to the U. S.
, including the rate of burnout and related work-balance challenges among doctors, political tensions affecting health care and struggles with private insurance companies. Most approvals for diagnostic tests and medications, for example, are initially turned down by U. S.
private insurance companies, Beck said. That requires health-care teams to continuously advocate for coverage, or patients will not get needed tests and treatment. “It is being overwhelmed by the system, it’s working constantly and never getting caught up, it’s having all this extra work put on them by the insurance companies and having to fight to take good care of your patients,” Beck said.
“That is real moral injury. ” Beck met his wife, Andrea, while they were pursuing master’s degrees in public health in New Orleans, and they spent a decade there and another nine years in Nashville, Tennessee. The couple felt they had a fairly good work-life balance, or as much as a couple could have, raising three kids while in medical school and residence.
They ran triathlons, had great vacations and gathered regularly with friends. But just months into the pandemic in 2020, the politicization of medicine became too much. Health-care workers were demonized for wearing masks or supporting COVID vaccines, and conspiracy theories were everywhere.