Minister hopeful of recruiting more doctors
Hospital foundation member highlights positives of working in West Prince
Prince Edward Island is currently 11.1 positions short of its physician complement, Health Minister Robert Mitchell noted in an interview following the annual meeting of the O’Leary Community Health Foundation. He admitted the number is fluid as retirements and relocations also occur. Seven of the current openings are in Prince County – four in Summerside and three in West Prince.
“Right now, it’s a challenge,” Mitchell acknowledged. “Every jurisdiction is out recruiting.”
He said there are currently doctors showing interest and doing site visits.
With the shortage in West Prince accounting for 25 per cent of the region’s complement, Mitchell told the annual meeting, West Prince recruitment is top priority.
“We’re hoping we’re able to fill the complement for P.E.I. over the next few months,” said the minister. “That’s optimistic but that’s how we have to tackle it.”
He said the recruitment efforts are ongoing.
Krystyna Pottier remembers, as a child of six or seven, walking down the street on her own, a dime in her pocket, to visit Roy Leard’s candy store. There’s no longer a candy store in downtown Alberton, but Pottier says that sense of Alberton being a safe place to raise children remains.
It is one of the points she highlights when she hosts site visits for doctors who are considering moving into vacant physician positions in West Prince.
“It’s just a really good place to live, in terms of being a safe community. If you have children, it’s really important to be in a safe community,” she commented.
Her experience runs deeper than that, though. Her late father, Dr. Stanley Hellmich, had served as a medical doctor in Alberton from 1954 to 1988. “My father, I know, was held in great esteem in this community.
“We’re trying to learn from what other communities have done and trying to see what we can do here to entice people and, once they get here, to make sure they stay. We’re very hopeful.” Krystyna Pottier
As a matter of fact, people still talk to me about him, and he died almost 20 years ago in Ontario, after having left here 30 years ago, almost.”
She said the community was good to him.
“That has always warmed my heart.”
Pottier says she doesn’t sugar-coat her presentation.
“I tell physicians, ‘it can be very snowy, and somewhat cold winters and, if you live on a dirt road, you’re going to have trouble, unless you have a fourwheel drive, come the spring.” She does, however, focus on the positives.
“You work in the hospital; the people are amazing who work there.
“You walk down the street and people speak to you; they know who you are. You go into the stores and people call you by name.” She had lived and worked in Ottawa for years, but always knew she would move back to Alberton. That day came 14 years ago. She recalls going into the post office on Christmas Eve looking for an anticipated package.
It hadn’t arrived.
That afternoon a worker at the post office reached her by phone, even though her number still wasn’t in the phonebook, to let her know another truck had arrived and the parcel was there.
“You just don’t get that kind of thing in the city.”
It’s also less costly to live in Alberton than in a city, she suggested.
“If you sold a house in Toronto, you could buy a beautiful place down here and still have money left in the bank.” A member of the Western Hospital Foundation, Pottier enjoys touring perspective members of the medical staff through the area. She acknowledges the need.
West Prince is currently three physicians, or 25 per cent, short of its complement of 12 physicians. It is in need of two family physicians and one emergency room doctor.
There are also indications three physicians in the area are looking to retire over the next two years.
She is also part of a recently formed committee consisting of representatives of Western and Community Hospitals’ foundations and auxiliaries, town council members from Tignish, Alberton and O’Leary, the West Prince Chamber of Commerce and Health P.E.I., which is focused on physician recruitment.
“We’re trying to learn from what other communities have done and trying to see what we can do here to entice people and, once they get here, to make sure they stay.
“We’re very hopeful.”