N.S. REVAMPING DOCTOR RECRUITMENT STRATEGY
Lead physician recruiter departs
The Nova Scotia Health Authority will shake up its doctor recruitment strategy as the number of people without family doctors continues to climb.
“The next steps in furthering our strategy involve taking a look at our structure, infrastructure and resources,” NSHA spokeswoman Kristen Lipscombe said in an email.
“To that end, we are in the process of launching a new recruitment website built on a marketing strategy developed last year that highlights all the things Nova Scotia offers beyond great medicine. We are working to update our IT infrastructure. This will support our reporting and evidence-based approach to our work.”
The flux at the authority has included the departure of lead physician recruiter Joanne MacKinnon, which Lipscombe confirmed Thursday, and Lynne Harrigan, the authority’s former vice-president of medicine and integrated care, who left Tuesday.
“Our physician recruitment strategy goals include reviewing the structure of the recruitment function for the organization and this work continues,” Lipscombe said in the email.
Despite incentive programs and increased provincial spending, the number of Nova Scotians without a family doctor is rising, according to the health authority’s “need a family practice” website.
The monthly totals have climbed every month this year, going from 41,877 on Jan. 1 to 56,630 as of Sept. 1 — an increase of 14,753, or 35 per cent this year.
Those numbers don’t take into account people without a doctor who haven’t registered with the health authority and estimates of the total number have approached 100,000.
Lipscombe said physician recruitment is currently supported by the senior director of medical affairs with two recruitment consultants in the authority’s northern zone and one each for the central, eastern and western zones.
The president of Doctors Nova Scotia said retention and recruitment of physicians is probably the most pressing problem in our health-care system right now.
“Solutions will require close collaboration between government, Doctors Nova Scotia and the NSHA/IWK,” Tim Holland said in an email to The Chronicle Herald. “In order to successfully recruit doctors, we need to focus on many different areas such as compensation, use of innovation and technology, mentoring, blended payment model, and more physician engagement.”
In a presentation to the Council of Nova Scotia Municipalities in June, the former recruitment leader Joanne MacKinnon and Grayson Fulmer, the senior director of medical affairs, said 156 additional doctors had started or committed to practising in Nova Scotia in 2017/18.
But 72 of those starts or commitments were for specialists in the authority’s central zone of Halifax Regional Municipality and West Hants. The report acknowledges challenges in recruiting rural specialists and family doctors.
In Thursday’s speech from the throne, Premier Stephen McNeil put the number of doctors that have been recruited at 160 and that nearly 18,000 Nova Scotians had been matched with a primary-care provider.