Recruitment effort aims to cure doctor shortage

Haldimand County isn’t using cash to draw physicians, banking instead on its small-town lifestyle

A full-time physician recruiter will help Haldimand County address a critical shortage of family doctors over the next three years.

Mike Evers, Haldimand’s general manager of community and development services, said the new recruiter will work with the Greater Hamilton Health Network to provide services to both Hamilton and Haldimand County.

Funding for the position was approved as part of the county’s 2024 operating budget. The new recruiter is expected to be on the job by June.

Evers noted Haldimand has seen six primary-care physicians exit their practices over the last five years, with only three moving in to replace them. A report Evers prepared for council last fall showed 18 per cent of the county’s doctors are older than 65. Four physicians are also considering retirement over the next one to three years.

“It’s getting more and more critical to bring additional primarycare physicians to the county,” Evers said in an interview.

Figures from the Haldimand Family Health Team show Dunnville is currently short by two family physicians. Hagersville needs two to three more family doctors. Caledonia is short by one to two doctors and Cayuga needs one additional family physician.

Evers noted the county is recruiting primary-care physicians who may also wish to work in one of the county’s two hospitals in Hagersville and Dunnville.

“Bringing primary-care physicians into the county, that will benefit those who do not presently have access to a family doctor, but it will also serve to benefit to some degree the hospitals, because primary-care physicians often spend a significant amount of time in hospital service,” said Evers.

Evers said the county is hoping to attract at least three new family physicians.

“We’re not going to settle for three,” he added. “We’d like to attract more than that, but we want to manage expectations for that.”

Evers noted that while Haldimand isn’t luring new doctors with financial incentives, the county offers a lower cost of living compared to larger urban centres, with cultural attractions and amenities like the Grand River and Lake Erie.

“We’re in the middle of everything, with a small-town rural lifestyle,” he said.

Sharon Moore, president and CEO of Haldimand War Memorial Hospital in Dunnville, said the hospital needs family physicians who can also assist in the emergency department and in-patient care.

In previous years, Moore noted retiring physicians would find their own replacements. But that hasn’t worked over the last five years, largely due to a reduction in candidates pursuing family medicine.

Moore said the situation has reached a critical point, with another family doctor retiring at the end of March.

“We are seeing that as doctors have left, we’ve had a reduced number of physicians coming into Dunnville,” said Moore.

For example, said Moore, over the last few years a husband-and-wife doctor team retired together, with only one new doctor moving in to take their place. When another physician retired, their practice was absorbed into an existing physician’s caseload.

“We need to maintain, and in fact, bump up our numbers to serve our community,” said Moore.

Brad van den Heuvel, director of physician recruitment at the Greater Hamilton Health Network, said the organization is extending the same recruitment and support services it offers to Hamilton to Haldimand County during the threeyear recruitment campaign.

He noted recruitment strategies will include advertising through online job portals like the Southern Ontario Physician Recruitment Alliance, networking at recruitment events and connecting with Canadian candidates training in other countries.

“We get a lot of local people that are training in the U.K., U.S. and Australia,” van den Heuvel noted. “Once they get licensed there, they can come back here to work.”

The network also collaborates with international candidates who may wish to move their practice to Canada, van den Heuvel said. In those cases, the network can help with immigration and licensing hurdles.

Other members of a Haldimand stakeholder committee examining the doctor shortage include Barbara Klassen, executive director of the Haldimand Family Health Team and Todd Stepanuik, president and CEO of Hagersville’s West Haldimand General Hospital.

We’re not going to settle for three (doctors). We’d like to attract more than that, but we want to manage expectations for that. MIKE EVERS HALDIMAND’S GENERAL MANAGER OF COMMUNITY AND DEVELOPMENT SERVICES