Heather Latter
Over the past few years, a number of doctors have either retired or left the community for other opportunities—and another is set to leave at the end of the month—but the local Physician Recruitment Committee actively continues its pursuit to bring in new physicians.
Allan Katz, CEO of Riverside Health Care Facilities, Inc., confirmed Dr. Jason Shack, who has been here about 14 years, will be wrapping up his practice here on Nov. 30.
“It’s a loss to the community because Dr. Shack and [his wife] Natasha are incredible members of the community and Dr. Shack, an incredible member of the medical staff,” he expressed.
“He’s done the supervision of the medical learners from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine [NOSM], he’s been actively involved in a lot of recruitment activities, chairs the recruitment committee between the hospital and Nelson Medicine and the community clinic and the town,” Katz continued.
“Very involved, very engaged,” he added. “Thunder Bay benefits from our loss.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Bahram Shahi left the community in August after his two-year return of service was complete.
“For personal and family reasons decided to relocate to southern Ontario,” Katz said. “We wish him the best. He thinks the world of Riverside, his colleagues and associates here.”
But the Physician Recruitment Committee is continuing its efforts, and provided tours for physicians and surgeons throughout the summer and into the fall.
“Over the summer, Dr. Anderson provided educational supervision to Dr. Shiraz Elkhier from Hamilton,” Katz noted.
“He’s got another year to go of school, but he loved it here,” he added, citing Dr. Elkhier certainly made an impression on the surgical staff.
“So often in physician recruitment, you are trying to address issues of the moment, but you can’t only do that—you have to look to the future as well,” Katz explained, noting they also toured another physician who won’t be available until next year.
In addition, Dr. Adel Abdurahman is a general surgeon, who is currently here for a three-month locum.
“One of the challenges with Dr. Shack leaving is, like all of our physicians, he does more than one thing,” Katz indicated.
“In the larger communities, you’ll see doctors who only work in the emergency department or they’ll only work in a clinic and won’t cover their patients admitted in a hospital.
“Then in some of the larger communities you’ll have doctors called hospitalists who only look after admitted patients,” he explained. “This is what happens in Thunder Bay. Your primary care physician tells you to go to the hospital, the hospital admits you through the emergency department most often than not, and then you are seen by a hospitalist who coordinates your care while you are in the hospital.”
Since Fort Frances, Emo, and Rainy River don’t have too many specialists, instead they have either have general practitioners or general surgeons.
“So our general practitioners end up covering emerg, some deliver babies, some see their residents in long-term care, some see their patients at the clinic, some see their patients when they are admitted into the hospital, and some do anesthesia,” Katz explained. “Some do more than two or three of some of those things.
“And that’s a problem because it’s a huge workload and when you don’t have the right number of physicians in a community, such as Fort Frances hasn’t since I got here and even before that, it becomes an unreasonable expectation,” he continued.
“So with Dr. Shack, he covers emerg, he does anesthesia, and he does clinic work,” noted Katz.
But Katz noted they are taking advantage of the Rural Family Medicine Locum Program offered through HealthForce Ontario.
“It’s a respite program,” he indicated. “It allows doctors to go off and do their continuing education, go on vacation, and it bring physicians in to replace them.”
Through this program, Drs. Jeff and Anne Parker recently provided some locum support.
Additionally, Dr. John Fotheringham and Dr. Carla Barkman are providing some locum clinic support at Nelson Medicine until the end of the year.
Meanwhile, another part of physician recruitment is hosting NOSM third-year learners for now the fifth-consecutive year.
This year’s students are Catherine Golding and Corban Hart, who arrived in August.
But Riverside Health Care’s physician recruiter Todd Hamilton explained that once a student completes four years of medical school, they then are placed in the residency program anywhere in Canada for two years after which they can continue with a specialty, if they so choose.
“We try to keep in touch with [students who have been placed here],” Katz expressed. “That’s Todd’s job.
“It’s great that in the residency program they are able to go elsewhere and gain additional experience, but when they decide that they want to settle down and create more of a traditional practice, that we are always being considered as an option,” he noted.
Katz indicated that with general practitioners taking on more than one task, it only works when there is an ample supply of physicians.
“When we have physician shortages, that’s when you begin to see situations where the physicians are working harder than we want them to be working because they need to have the quality of life that new graduates are expecting,” Katz said.
“That’s an important component,” he continued. “A lot of the physicians right now, and I don’t mean to generalize, but they are looking for the balance and quality of work life, so not necessarily being on call 24-hours a day, three or four days in-a-row.
“They want as much as possible the 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday to Friday, so that they can take advantage of everything else.”
“The new graduates are cautious about coming to communities where they’ll be welcomed and then saddled with three or four components of the health care system where they are in the clinic, rounding patients in the hospital, in the ER, and then doing other things as well,” Hamilton noted.
“Some would rather do a locum, which is a temporary situation to see how it is,” he voiced. “And that is prevalent in Canada with new physicians.
“So we have to do our best to accommodate them in their locums, so they can see they can have a work-life balance here, as well as a varied practice, so they are not doing one thing every day,” said Hamilton.
Katz noted Healthforce Ontario has helped get new emergency department physicians to come up from southern Ontario through the Emergency Department Coverage Demonstration Project.
“We get, for the most part, physicians that only work emergency,” he said. “They come up here and they quite enjoy it. We have a fairly modern emergency department.”
And Hamilton said he’s staying positive because he continues to receive inquiries about the local job postings.
“We have no less than half a dozen interested GPs in Fort Frances,” he mentioned. “We are giving them all the information they require.
“We’re offering site visits and providing incentive information and they are weighing us versus other communities and hopefully we’ll here some news from them in the spring,” added Hamilton.
Katz noted they have been in contact with physicians who have expressed an interested from as far away as Sherbrooke, as far north as northern Manitoba.
“So we’re not only looking within the province, but we’re also looking outside,” he added.
And when interested physicians come to tour the community, they get the “red carpet” treatment.
“We don’t set them up in a hotel and leave them alone,” Katz said, citing they engage them socially, as well as professionally.
“Todd is great about getting them out in a boat and taking them around, showing what all the community offers.
“That’s what is going to sell those physicians on this community,” he added, noting they’ve had great support from their partners at the Town of Fort Frances, the Fort Frances Community Clinic, and Nelson Medicine.
“We’ve been very fortunate to have a strong core of family physicians who have remained here for a long time and we have to start getting used to the idea of turnover, where physicians come for a few years, maybe five years, and then they go to another town and we bring in new physicians,” Hamilton noted.
“We have to be able to plug physicians into our programs, unplug the ones that want to go, and carry on,” he expressed.
“We have to be prepared for two to five years and we have to appreciate that physicians come here and wish them well when they go and then keep having more physicians in the background to visit us.
“And if they stay longer, that’s great,” Hamilton added, noting he is doing everything he can, including having a strong presence on social media, to attract new physicians.
“So we’re not only doing one thing, we’re doing several things,” Katz stressed. “We’re trying to convert some of our regular locums to relocate here, some of the students who have been here, once they graduate we keep in touch with them.
“There’s a lot on the go,” he added.
