Laws of attraction
New ideas needed to recruit MDs to rural areas: doctors
With doctor recruitment efforts faltering at the provincial level, representatives in rural Nova Scotia are taking matters into their own hands.
“What’s been recognized is that … municipalities need to get involved with their local doctors and be part of recruitment,” said David Kogon, the mayor of Amherst and a retired obstetrician.
Kogon said he and his deputy mayor Sheila Christie, Oxford Mayor Trish Stewart and Joe Van Vulpen, the deputy warden of the municipality of Cumberland County, are all directly involved with strategy groups or recruitment committees.
For example, Stewart will represent municipalities at an upcoming family practice job fair in Digby and Kogon will flog rural Nova Scotia at a fair in his native Toronto.
“You gotta sell your community,” he said. “I think living in rural Nova Scotia is fantastic and I’m born and raised in Toronto, I’m a big city boy . . . I think by selling that to prospective recruits, and say look, there’s more to life than just work.”
Historically, the rural areas have been given short shrift in “Halifax-centric” provincial recruitment programs so it’s up to local representatives to take up the slack, Kogon said.
“They kind of paid less attention, I wouldn’t say they paid no attention, to the peripheral areas but you know, 55 per cent of the population of Nova Scotia lives in rural communities and can’t really be ignored,” he said.
The challenges of doctor recruitment have been highlighted in the past week with the departures of high-level officials at the Nova Scotia Health Authority amid a lengthening list of people without family doctors. The authority has said it plans to revamp its recruitment strategy and hire more recruitment assistants in the rural areas such as the western and eastern NSHA zones.
While about 160 doctors started new practices or committed to do so in the past year, almost half are specialists in the Halifax area.
The president of Doctors Nova Scotia commended the efforts of rural representatives in promoting their communities.
“Absolutely,” said Tim Holland when asked if more emphasis should be placed on this level of recruitment. “No one knows how to recruit and shine a light on the positive aspects of the community like the community and nobody knows how to recruit doctors like doctors.”
Holland, an emergency medicine specialist, also singled out compensation as an important piece of any new recruitment and retention plan.
“There have been a number of important first steps made toward improving the situation, notably the $39.6 million for primary care last spring,” he said in an interview Friday. “However there’s still a long way to be able to get to a position where we can reliably retain the docs we have and start recruiting new doctors that we don’t yet have.
“There’s a multitude of factors that are going to have to play into the solution, most importantly Doctors Nova Scotia, the health authority and the Health Department need to be working together on a solution . . . Compensation is obviously a big part of it but also some other factors such as physician engagement and properly enabling technology innovation in a way that helps increase efficiency but also attracts young physicians.”