By CONSTANCE GIBBS
There were only a handful of Salt Springers to ask questions about primary care at a recent ASK Salt Spring event facilitated skilfully, as always, by Gayle Baker.
The expert panel who showed up were ready and able to answer questions about primary care to a very small audience. Gayle’s notes are at asksaltspring.com if you want to see what you missed.
The panel was made up of people at the heart of the action on primary care: Lady Minto Hospital site director Erin Price Lindstrom; Eric Jacobsen, the executive director of Lady Minto Foundation; Sarah Bulmer, who is the Salt Spring program lead for the Primary Care Network, South Island Division of Family Practice; and Dr. Peter Verheul, a family doctor taking valuable time away from his work at the clinic and hospital, who is also a board member of the new Island Community Clinic Society.
Yes, progress IS happening in getting people attached to a doctor. It is painfully slow and requires recruitment action on many fronts: enticing doctors from other countries, wooing residents and locums, using professional recruiters, using professional networks at university medical schools.
It takes a holistic approach to court a doctor: team-based clinic space, housing, childcare, showing people around the island. All this and more to convince them to come to us and enjoy the natural beauty and warm, safe community of Salt Spring. Why should we be such a hard sell, you might ask?
Answer: supply and demand. There are more communities looking for doctors than there are doctors looking to practise in rural communities. We’re in a desperate competition.
In my mind’s eye, I see a cartoon of a recruiter kneeling in front of a young doctor in a white coat holding out flowers and beseeching them for a commitment.
A few years ago I sat on a recruitment and retention committee led by a local doctor who wanted to retire but didn’t want patients to be abandoned. Our committee just couldn’t crack the primary care puzzle. Hopes were raised, and then dashed. The committee dissolved and the good doctor found another way to get a replacement.
Looking at the panel of primary care professionals at the ASK event, I felt a surge of pride in them. They’re young, as is anyone under age 50 to me. But most of all, they’re smart, skillful and hugely dedicated to primary care access. We’re in good hands.
If you’re one of those people without a doctor, or if you know someone in that unfortunate group, get yourself (and them) registered on healthlinkbc.ca.
It can make a difference.