Med students to get rural `day-in-the life' experience
Vulcan County-raised woman arranges trip to area for urban U of C classmates
Chatting with classmates, Alyssa Groves realized few of her fellow University of Calgary first-year medical students were from rural communities.
Most were from big cities — Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto — but thought it would be “cool” to see Groves' family farm near Champion, in Vulcan County.
Groves, determined to provide them with insight into rural life and health care, set about organizing a full day of learning for them.
On Saturday, 56 of Groves' classmates are being bused from the Foothills Medical Centre to the Vulcan Community Health Centre, where they'll do some skill-building at various stations with local doctors and nurses, and get a look at the facility with community members.
They'll also be taken to Groves' family farm — mostly a grain operation but also home to 40 head of cattle — for a tour. There will also be a panel discussion on understanding rural communities and the people who live in them.
Both the local community and the University of Calgary Cumming School of Medicine, through its Distributed Learning and Rural Initiatives department, have helped Groves organize and pay for the excursion.
While Groves hopes to recruit family doctors to practise at Vulcan's health centre, she says the main goal of the trip is to give the students a better understanding of rural residents, farming and smalltown life.
“At the very least, this is going to help all these people be better doctors to people from rural communities,” says the 22-year-old, who wants to practise medicine in a small town within an hour's drive of the family farm.
Vulcan needs to recruit students, showing them the benefits of living and working in the community, before they've made up their minds where they're going to practise, says Brenda Findlay, who chairs the Vulcan and County health-care worker attraction and retention committee.
“If any of them show any interest at all, we'll make it easy for them to contact us,” she says.
Housing new health-care professionals is one of the biggest obstacles the community faces, says Findlay.
“There is no rental housing in Vulcan. If we don't find housing for them, we're not going to keep them.”
The Crowsnest Medical Clinic in Blairmore has had success recruiting medical students who spent part of their learning time there, says manager Michele Austad.
Physicians staff the clinic and the town's Crowsnest Pass Health Centre, which has a 24/7 emergency department. The clinic, with a roster of about 5,000 patients, is an active teaching clinic, taking medical students and residents from the universities of Calgary and Alberta. In 2022, it was chosen the best rural education site of the year by University of Calgary students and staff. Of the nine physicians currently at the clinic, four did their residency in the Crowsnest Pass.
“People who come to do their rotations here are intending to practise as rural practitioners,” says Austad, noting a good work atmosphere helps retain physicians.
“It compensates a lot for money, and (the clinic's physicians) cover each other ... so they can all get their time off,” says Austad. “That's really important.”
The Crowsnest Medical Clinic team earlier this week was named a Rhapsody Healthcare Hero Award recipient from the Alberta Rural Health Professions Action Plan.
When seven physicians left within 18 months in 2019 and 2020, the clinic didn't turn any of their former doctors' patients away, instead telling them they could see one of the remaining physicians on staff, says Austad.