Peggy Revell
Praise for the combined effort of communities and the Northern Ontario Medical School to train doctors, with hopes these graduating students will remain in northern and remote communities, was the focus during a dinner hosted by the NOSM here last Tuesday evening.
“It really is wonderful for us that Fort Frances hosts students,” Dr. Roger Strasser, the founding dean of the NOSM, told those on hand.
“The success, really, of our whole program, the MD program, the residency program, and our other education programs, health sciences, and the interprofessional education, depend very much on the support, co-operation, and collaborations that involve communities, involve the other health-care providers, involve the institutions.”
Dr. Strasser praised the health care facilities in Rainy River District after he and other NOSM administration had the opportunity to tour them during their visit to the area last week.
NOSM is the first new school of medicine in Ontario in 30 years, with 2009 to see its very first graduates.
Fort Frances is one of the 12 communities that hosts these students, including Liz Cooper and Andrea Haner this year (they were profiled in the Nov. 5, 2008 edition of the Times).
The NOSM curriculum is unique in that students spend their third year doing a “comprehensive community clerkship” in family practice clinics in smaller communities throughout Northern Ontario, explained Dr. Strasser, which means they encounter a variety of medical situations as different patients come in.
At other medical schools, by comparison, students go through block rotations where they encounter specializations (i.e., pediatrics, maternity, etc.) in large learning hospitals.
“We have a great partnership with NOSM, the town, Riverside Health Care [Facilities, Inc.] and obviously Nelson Medicine [the clinic],” Riverside CEO Wayne Woods noted at last Tuesday’s dinner.
“I think it’s a great experience for these students,” he remarked. “What you’re going to learn in a Northern Ontario medicine field is not what you’re going to learn in downtown Toronto. You’re going to see everything coming through our door.
“Obviously, we have a vested interest,” Woods added. “We’d like to welcome these people back to join our community and to be part of us.
“That’s the aim of the whole NOSM program and hopefully it’s going to work,” he stressed.
“This program has seen that students can learn in other ways,” echoed local doctor Jason Shack, who also spoke briefly at the dinner. “That they can get what they need to get by not being in a large urban teaching hospital.”
Inviting these students to Fort Frances comes from “two sides,” noted Dr. Shack.
The first is altruistic in nature—to provide and teach these students, and give them the opportunity to learn medicine in a broad based environment, as well as what it’s like to practise medicine while living in a smaller Northern Ontario town.
“The other side of what we get from this is somewhat selfish from the point of view of teachers,” Dr. Shack continued. “It’s nice to have students around, it’s nice to have residents around.
“Fort Frances is a community that has had students and residents around for a very long time,” he noted. “It’s always been a tradition of practising medicine here.
“Hopefully, by bringing these students out to these towns, we can teach them something but also teach them something about what it’s like to be here, and hope that at some point in the future they consider coming back.”
“The community of Fort Frances takes pride in their role of hosting medical students in residence,” said Deputy Mayor Sharon Tibbs as she extended a welcome to the two medical students doing their clerkship here, as well as to the NOSM staff and administration whom she encouraged to return often to the area.
“We understand the role we play to have these learners become knowledgeable about communities they may consider as a future site for their practise.
“Fort Frances understands the benefits of welcoming and recruiting of medical professionals,” she added. “It affords us the opportunities to show who we are to the learners, who may wish to return as practising physicians.”
