Doctor honoured for service to rural medicine
Dr. Lyn Power graduated from MUN'S medical school, then headed for Burin
There are a lot of reasons why Dr. Lyn Power has devoted her professional life to practising rural medicine, but the sense of teamwork and community is why she stays.
Power, who has practised rural medicine for 26 years, was recently honoured by the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada (SRPC) with a Fellowship of Rural and Remote Medicine of the SRPC and a Rural Long Service Award, which is for physicians who have served rural communities in Canada for 20 or more years.
Additionally, she was part of the Memorial University team that was given the Rural Education Award, which is presented to a Canadian medical school that encourages students to pursue further training in rural medicine.
Power grew up in Southern Harbour, near Arnold’s Cove, and went to medical school at Memorial University. She said going to medical school there, in the province, really showed her how significant rural medicine is.
“Rural medicine is really important, and when I started medical school in 1992 I remember someone saying that in the first orientation week, and it resonated with me,” she said. “It's definitely harder because obviously there are disadvantages to living in a rural area, but I think the more opportunity people have to see the great pieces of rural medicine, the more people it will draw in. There's lots of us who've come to rural and stayed for a long time.”
When Power was in medical school, Burin was one of the sites where she worked and did her residency, and when she graduated and was looking for somewhere to practice, the area had what she was looking for: community and teamwork.
“I liked what I saw in the sense of community. People are engaged,” she said. “To me it was an area where I saw more teamwork and people pitching in to help out, to work together, to make sure things are successful. I think I chose to be here because I wanted to be a full-scope family doctor and I wanted to be able to do that in an area where there was some support. Full-scope family medicine is not always easy to do right. Here I get to do a lot of things for people. I can help with their chemo, palliative care, help deliver their grandkids, I work emerge, I do hospital in patient coverage. I kind of do all of that, whereas if I was in the city, I wouldn't be able to do all of those things. I wanted to be a generalist and I wanted to be able to do that in a supportive environment and, rural was definitely the best fit for me.”
While it might seem like Power would be too busy working as a doctor to do much else, she’s also the undergrad program director for Memorial’s school of medicine and was recently made the clinical chief for rural eastern health region of Newfoundland Health Services. While it can be daunting, she said, she loves the people she gets to work with, and the impact she gets to make.
Working with Memorial is rewarding in its own way, Power said, but she enjoys helping young people see the value in rural medicine and helping give them the opportunity to see it in action.
“Part of what I do with Memorial is to try to find good places for people to practise, to get training,” she said. “You hear everywhere people are closing practices and if there are less and less family doctors in communities practising, then that means we don’t have those places necessarily now to send our students. One of the reasons why we’ve been successful is that our students get really great opportunities to spend time in rural and learn the value of it.”
The mandate of the medical school at Memorial is to provide physicians for all of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Power said she takes that responsibility very seriously and is proud to be part of it.
She said there are more challenges facing rural medicine than ever before, and people are getting burned out. She said there is no easy fix to the issue, and even solutions like incentivising doctors to go to a certain area ends up pitting them against other regions that also need more medical professionals.
“It’s always kind of robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she said. “One of my friends said to me a while ago, ‘I can’t believe you’re still working rurally,’ and the scope of what I’m doing and that I’m adding more things on and kind of not taking away. There are things in my day I would rather not do, but I think we all, in the Burin region, share those things that we don’t enjoy. That’s made it sustainable for us. But it’s hard because if someone gets sick or someone has a baby, and your workforce is down by one or two people, it’s really hard to recruit support to rural.”
Power said she doesn’t know what the solution is to address the rural doctor shortage, but incentivizing people to practise rural family medicine would be a start.
“It’s not a simple fix. You’re competing with all of Canada, since there are shortages everywhere,” she said. “For me, though, at the end of the day the sense of community, the ability to be a generalist in a supportive environment, with patients who appreciate and respect what I do for them, is why I’m still here.”