Duane Hicks
Two third-year students from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine wrapped up their comprehensive community clerkships here last week after spending about the last eight months learning on the job from local physicians and other health-care professionals.
The third set of medical students who have come through here since 2007, Michael Long and Kevin Warwick spent the 30-week period working with physicians at La Verendrye Hospital and the Fort Frances Community Clinic, as well as observed specialists and various local allied health-care professionals (i.e., chiropractors, dentists, speech pathologists, pharmacists, home care workers, etc.), thanks to an affiliation agreement between the NOSM and Riverside Health Care Facilities, Inc. that allows students to gain valuable hands-on practical experience in the Fort Frances area.
And there’s no doubt they felt their time here was an excellent learning experience.
“The opportunity for us to come to Fort Frances is incredible in that there’s a lot of work that goes into it through the school and all of the doctors that actually work here,” said Long, who hails from Thunder Bay and currently is attending the Lakehead campus of the NOSM.
“It’s a pretty unique environment in that we get exposed to family medicine, emergency medicine, anesthesia, surgery, all of the allied health professionals and their practices,” he noted.
“With so many people working together in a team environment, it enriches the learning experience.
“It’s not disconnected in that I am learning it in different place,” Long added. “You’re at the epicenter and seeing it from this community’s perspective as opposed to different communities.
“Fort Frances has a lot of resources that we were able to engage with.”
Long said he looks at the conclusion of the comprehensive community clerkship with mixed emotions.
“It’s exciting to look back and see all of the things we did, and your favourite experiences, whether they were in the emerg where there was a trauma or you were in the ER and you’re doing your first intubation,” he remarked.
“Those were all exciting, and you get kind of jacked up and proud of yourself for everything that you’ve learned,” he enthused.
“But at the same, I was feeling today that I am actually pretty sad because I am leaving behind all of the amazing people I got to work with over the last eight months,” Long added.
“Working with several of the doctors for eight months allow you to have a pretty personal and professional relationship,” he noted. “It becomes an enriched experience in that the feedback and interactions you have with the doctors is real.
“It’s not just this fleeting, temporary thing where you’re with one preceptor for two or three weeks,” he explained. “You’re actually engaged with these people for months, almost a year, essentially.”
Long, who’s came here with his wife, Karen, and their three children, Mackenzie, Solomon, and Madelyn, also was impressed by the community, which warmly welcomed him and his family.
“We had two boys go to J.W. Walker—they loved the school, they loved the teachers,” he noted. “We had a great neighbourhood there on [the 500 block of] Second Street [West].
“My kids fell into sync with the neighbourhood boys. They were running around, having a blast,” said Long, adding one of his sons also played IP2 hockey while the other took Tae Kwon Do classes.
Meanwhile, Long said his wife and daughter got involved with activities at the library and Children’s Complex, where they got further connected with other families.
“Our neighbourhood really
welcomed us, we had great neighbours,” he stressed. “We were really immersed. We enjoyed our time . . . my kids got invited to birthday parties and sleepovers.
“It was great . . . we really felt like we were part of the community of Fort Frances.”
Overall, Long felt he learned “a ton” in the past 30 weeks.
“I still have a lot to learn, but I am really thankful for the mentoring and the instruction and just friendship that my preceptors, the nurses, and the technicians at the hospital so freely gave to me,” he remarked.
Long said he already has highly-recommended Fort Frances to other NOSM students.
“I actually had an opportunity to speak about Fort Frances to the students that are in years behind me,” he noted.
“When I talked, I said I was really impressed with the opportunities we had here and how well our scheduling was done to ensure we had really broad experiences.
“So we had a lot of time in anesthesia, but we also had a lot of time in surgery, and a lot of time in emergency. It wasn’t like we were doing just one thing.
“I feel like we really got great exposure in all of those areas.
“That’s what I hammered home to those potential people—you get a comprehensive experience in Fort Frances,” Long continued.
“The nice thing is there’s only the two of us, so we kind of get spoiled . . . there’s not that competition with five or six other students.
“It was highly-recommended to us, and it will be highly-recommended to the students that follow.”
Long, who plans to get into family medicine but still has another year of med school to go, followed by two-three years’ residency, said he definitely would consider coming back to Fort Frances to practice.
“I enjoyed my time in Fort Frances,” he reiterated. “The doctors themselves are extremely dedicated, they’re really great examples in how much they sacrifice their time and really give an incredible amount of their lives to this community as far as providing 24-hour medical care with a limited number.
“There’s an excellent hospital, staff that are great to work with.
“I would consider Fort Frances one of the places I would like to work in the future.”
Warwick, who earned his degree in human biology in Alberta before relocating to Thunder Bay to attend the NOSM, said they were very grateful to the patients who let him and Long observe and, in some cases, work with them over the past eight months.
“Without the patients accepting us into the community, we are nothing, we can’t learn,” he stressed. “We can’t do it without them.
“Them accepting us into the community, not just as people but allowing us to train, is incredible.”
Warwick noted the allied health-care professionals, such as hearing specialists, have been top-notch in teaching them the many aspects of medicine.
“They’ve taken us on and really given us a great opportunity,” he enthused.
Warwick said it’s possible he could come back here to practice down the road, admitting he has no idea where life will lead him at this point. But the community and hospital has the things he looks for.
“The community as a whole, the people in it, the professionals in it, the hospital and the access to it, the nursing staff, the imaging staff—where else can you go and have a CT in hours to days?” he remarked.
“The nurses are always there, the support staff are always there.
“That’s what impressed me.”
While they were very busy over the past 30 weeks, both Long and Warwick did get some downtime away from the health-care realm.
“One of my highlights was tromping around with Dr. Nelson on his acreage,” said Long. “We went snowshoeing one afternoon, spending three or four hours building friendship and chatting about things other than medicine.
“Just experiencing the outdoors.”
Warwick said he spent a fair amount of time outdoors, but most of all enjoyed time spent on the waters of Rainy Lake.
“I had never been sailing,” he recalled fondly. “I went out with Dr. Spencer and Dr. Shack.
“I had never sailed before, and it was just unbelievable.”
Dr. Jason Shack said Long and Warwick were “great students” and it was “a good year to have them around.”
“Like I say all the time, they teach us as much, if not more, than we teach them,” he explained.
“Medical students typically come into an area, and they’re young and they’re eager and they’re interested—they light that spark for medicine that after a while, with various frustrations, it’s easy for us to lose every now and then,” Dr. Shack admitted.
“It’s nice to have them around.”
Dr. Shack noted the hope of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine is to train students so they stay in the north to practice.
“Whether that’s for a period of time or that’s for their lifetime, it would help the situation we’re in now,” he reasoned.
“It’s still a number of years away before we see that coming to fruition because the first-year class is just finishing their first year of residency,” Dr. Shack said. “They’re another year or two from entering into practice.
“It’s a fair amount of time before you reap the benefits of all of this, but you have to start somewhere,” he stressed.
Dr. Lorena Jenks said it’s refreshing to have the med students around each year.
“I think we’re getting [better] at teaching them because we know what the expectations are a little more,” she explained.
“But the other thing is you have to explain what you’re doing and justify the decisions you have made, and it makes you more accountable.”
While most of the students attending NOSM are from rural communities, and are not unfamiliar with the region, it helps for them to find out first-hand what it’s like working in Fort Frances and other similar communities, added Dr. Jenks.
“If you haven’t experienced it, you don’t know what it’s like,” she reasoned.
“We try to encourage them to come back.”
