YOUNG DOCTORS ARE SEEING
Local health care reshaped by physicians choosing to stay since Schulich campus opened
Until he started studying at the Schulich School of Medical and Dentistry’s local campus in the fall of 2016, Toronto native Nathan Tam only knew Windsor from driving through it to the U.S. border.
The route to the border hardly offers the city’s most flattering side, and Windsor seemed destined to become an educational pit stop on Tam’s path to becoming a family physician.
But it has grown on him thanks to the opportunities he’s been given at the medical school campus.
“I’m definitely open to staying in Windsor,” Tam says. “The image I had of Windsor in my head before I came here and what I feel now are completely different. The longer I’ve lived here the more I realized I don’t like being in Toronto. I feel I can make more of an impact as a physician here than in Toronto where it’s supersaturated with doctors.”
The landscape of local health care is being reshaped by the physicians, 90 so far, who have chosen to stay since the Schulich campus opened in 2008.
“Doctors stay where they train because they develop contacts professionally and they get comfortable with the community. I can see that happening in myself now," Tam said.
Vaughn native Dr. Katherine Kobosz, who came for the residency program in 2010, said she and her husband needed six months to decide she would open her family practice locally.
She didn’t know much about Windsor when she applied, but she liked the physicians who interviewed her. The affordable cost of living and proximity to Detroit were also attractions.
“The people we worked with were great,” Kobosz said of her residency. “I got to train with the specialists one-on-one. It’s given me a rapport with most of the specialists in the area I wouldn’t have in a big city.”