BY CONNIE GIBBS
Special to the Driftwood
In May of this year, the CBC radio program White Coat, Black Art, hosted by Dr. Brian Goldman, reported that “Fewer physicians are choosing family medicine as a specialty.” Along with the entire country, Salt Spring is in a fierce competition for family doctors.
Maybe you don’t have a family doctor, or you do, but he/she is edging closer to retirement. Happily, there is some good news for Salt Spring Islanders worried about their access to a family doctor. There is a Recruitment and Retention Working Group on Salt Spring whose focus is to bring doctors to our community and keep them here. The group is pleased that Salt Spring is now a member of the South Island Division of Family Practice.
I’d never heard of this membership community of family doctors in southern Vancouver Island and Salt Spring Island. Joining this group means Salt Spring Island now has a family doctor recruiter, Niki Bouchard. She is one busy woman, recruiting to fill locums as well as permanent family doctors for communities on south Vancouver Island and Salt Spring. Locums are short-term backfills for doctors on leave, usually for vacation purposes.
Bouchard explains, “Locums can be an important way to recruit a new doctor. If it’s a good experience, the doctor might commit to setting up a practice and putting down roots. Family doctors are community people.”
Bouchard travels to “meet- and-greet” conferences across the country trying to woo newly minted family doctors to our neck of the woods. At a Toronto conference recently she talked up B.C.’s improved compensation plan for family doctors. Many graduates are struggling with burdensome levels of education debt, not to mention the costs of starting a practice, which comes with overhead, staff and a load of bureaucratic paperwork.
Many family doctors are choosing the new B.C. payment model, called longitudinal family practice, preferring this new plan to the old “fee for service one,” which is still available as a payment option, although less popular. Besides recruiting homegrown Canadian doctors, Bouchard works with international doctors, many of whom are looking to live in their faith communities where they can practise their religion. Salt Spring can’t offer what large urban centres can.
Other barriers are the familiar ones of lack of rental housing, as well as access to childcare, employment opportunities for spouses. Bouchard works holistically with prospective doctors to try and address their needs.
On the plus side, Salt Spring offers a wealth of recreation and natural beauty, opportunities to vary workload with shifts in Emergency and Acute Care, and midwives to handle maternity cases. One of the best draws is that Salt Spring is surprisingly well known across Canada. At a recent meet and greet in Ontario, Bouchard was swamped with questions from new graduates about working in B.C. One had heard of Salt Spring and asked if it was near “Victoria Island.”
Recruiting family doctors is a long process. It can take 18 to 24 months to recruit one. It’s a painstaking journey requiring patience on both sides and a willingness to navigate multiple barriers. Bouchard reassures me that “recruitment is happening” and points to 15 to 20 new doctors recently added to the region.
She stresses the importance of a collaborative community approach to help break down barriers such as housing and to help doctors get to know their new communities. Exciting examples of community support for medical staff are beginning to emerge. Relying on a lone recruiter to do it all is not realistic. It takes a community to throw in their support as the following link outlines: bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-island-group-release-playbook-of-proposed-solutions-to-health-carecrisis-1.6922901.
As the White Coat, Black Art program referenced above stated, “Having new doctors and their families feel welcomed and supported in the community helps keep them long term.” Bouchard says simply, “You need to take care of the healthcare people who are taking care of you.”