Brockton officials say all but about 15 people who showed up to a Walkerton patient sign-up event with a new doctor made it onto a list.
A line of over 1,000 people snaked through the snowy parking lot of the Walkerton Legion Wednesday. Each person hoping to sign themselves or a loved one up to be a patient of Dr. Mitchell Currie.
The first 500 people were accepted as patients and the following 500 are on a waiting list.
Deputy Mayor Kym Hutcheon has been on the Brockton & South Bruce physician recruitment team for 20 years. She notes, Dr. Currie’s spouse is also a doctor and is in the United States awaiting final accreditation to work in Canada, and she intends to take on the 500 person waiting list.
While the number of people still looking for a doctor in the area is probably more than the 15 who were left over Wednesday, Hutcheon notes, “We are fairly certain one of our incoming doctors will be taking more patients.”
Brockton Mayor Chris Peabody explains in an interview with Bayshore Broadcasting News, “We’ve got a great physician recruitment committee,” adding they’ve recruited in the past, at least five young physicians to work in Walkerton. “So in terms of recruitment we’re in great shape,” says Peabody.
He says, the previous physicians who came on board took over the practices of retiring physicians.
“Two years ago we were in a pretty bad spot with a lot of our elderly group of GPs in Walkerton and this committee did a great job of recruiting young people. They knew the problem was coming, they didn’t wait for the retirement, they got very proactive. We got a joint committee with the Municipality of South Bruce and they’ve had great success.”
He adds, “But when a young physician takes over a list of clients from a retiring doctor, that leaves those who might have moved to Walkerton and who were never on the list, never had a doctor, they’re called orphan patients, that leaves them with no ability to get in on the new doctor.”
Peabody, says, “So Dr Currie who is very altruistic– he had this idea that he wanted to give the orphaned patients in the region a chance. So this was the idea that he came up with the ‘first-come-first-served,’ it was an excellent altruistic idea.”
He says, “Some people have asked me if he was trying to make a political statement and the answer is absolutely not.”
The mayor notes, “It was with the best of intentions to fill the first orphaned patients in the region and it was very successful.”
“So about 99 per cent of the people in that line went away with a very positive outcome thanks to Dr. Currie and our physician recruitment committee,” says Peabody.
Deputy Mayor Hutcheon, who was at the event signing people up says she’s still waiting on general information about where people were coming from, but of the 100 she personally registered, people were from all over, but many were from Brockton or just on the outskirts. She notes there were people who lined up for their family members and seniors as well. She says the people she saw were, “Extremely grateful, and almost in tears when I said ‘Congratulations you have a doctor.’ ” She said she didn’t hear much complaint about lining up and notes, they were through the line by about early afternoon.
She says the physician recruitment committee is working diligently to recruit more doctors to the area.
Hutcheon says what’s been working well for them is focusing on doctors who are already from the area, or who are accustomed to living in a rural area. It’s her view that if recruiters only rely on money to attract a physician, more money can attract them back out of the community.
Family doctors are in short supply in Grey Bruce, and Dr. Currie was one of three doctors to announce they had room for patients this month.
Two new doctors in South Bruce Peninsula recently announced they were taking patients which also saw a big response. Those two doctors are part of the Practice Ready Ontario program which is for physicians trained outside of Canada. In that program, the newcomer physician is overseen by a team of doctors for a period of time. Then they go and work in a community with a year over close oversight by a local doctor to ensure Canadian standards are met.
Not far away, the Town of Saugeen Shores has been offering incentives to attract physicians to its community, a $500 stipend to locums or physicians doing their third year of residency for some shifts they work in the Southampton or Kincardine ERs. Owen Sound is helping to provide housing to medical students in the city, and needs about 12 new doctors in the next couple of years.
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Both Peabody and Hutcheon have recommendations about how to address the need for doctors.
Peabody wants to see more funding from the provincial government, noting “More and more municipalities are putting bigger and bigger budgets into health care. It didn’t used to be the case.”
He adds, “Whether it’s for equipment at the hospitals, like the CT scan campaigns, or whether it’s for physician recruitment or mental health supports. At Bruce county, it was an initiative of mine to make sure that the county funded the Brightshores wellness centre up there in Owen Sound to give people with issues with addiction and mental health treatment services at that centre. I’m very proud that was one of my legacies as warden that I was able to support that, but it did mean that we had to take money off the tax base in Bruce County to pay for it which isn’t’ always easy. It’s not a traditional duty of the County. We’re collecting taxes for roads, ambulances and long-term care not an addiction treatment facility, but in this case we did.”
When that Wellness and Recovery Centre opened its doors in Owen Sound, Premier Doug Ford and Health Minister Sylvia Jones were on hand for the event.
Peabody says since then the County decided that was the last healthcare project it will help fund because the County can’t keep doing it.
Meanwhile Hutcheon hopes a delegation at the Rural Ontario Municipal Association Conference (ROMA) next week will garner some funding to continue quality care in the Walkerton hospital’s birthing unit. She notes it’s the largest birthing centre in the area, after Owen Sound and notes, the next closest is Stratford.
Over the two decades Hutcheon has been working to recruit doctors, she’s come to believe there needs to be more rural medical training. “I think that goes back to the government limiting the number of medical students years ago,” says Hutcheon, adding, “They have to increase their numbers and opening medical schools in the GTA really doesn’t help rural Ontario. We need them in rural Ontario so that student doctors can get a feel of life in rural Ontario and see what possibilities they would have here.”