Canadian medical students voice their concerns

I read with great interest the article by Irfan Dhalla and colleagues on the demographics of Canadian medical students.¹ However, as a student from the province of Quebec, I was disappointed that data from the Quebec universities were not included.

As reasons for excluding Quebec students, the authors list a poor response rate, incomplete email databases and a “large number of premedical students.” To correct these problems, the survey could have been better publicized and a more thorough search for emails should have been conducted. In addition, the authors' concern about premedical students is unfounded; they could have easily eliminated those responses from the final analysis if they wished to do so.

To make pan-Canadian inferences about Canadian medical students without including a quarter of Canadian medical faculties is a grave error.

Panayiotis Glavas Medical Student Université de Montréal Montreal, Que.