The president of the North Bay Regional Health Centre says the doctor shortage here has reached a "crisis" level.
Paul Heinrich says the hospital has very little trouble attracting specialist doctors, however family practitioners are a "huge concern".
"We lost one of our wonderful doctors, Dr. Rivet this past year and we've had a couple of retirements of practitioners who did very, very high volume and that's transitioned it from a real problem to a crisis, and I am regarding it as a crisis around family practitioners because we rely even in the hospital for their staffing let alone doing enough community intervention to create less pressure on the hospital and support patients in the community appropriately."
Heinrich estimates North Bay is short close to 15 doctors, but the additional problem is that there will be additional departures and retirements this year.
"Over the next five years we need to be recruiting probably 25 new practitioners to support the gap which is probably around 13,000 orphan patients in the community, plus deal with the upcoming retirements. That's a huge number."
Heinrich believes the area has to come together as a community around family practitioners and so the hospital is going to be submitting a formal request to the city to help support and augment what the hospital is already doing to help make North Bay as competitive as possible.
"We've seen other communities have a better rate of retention of new doctors than we do.
"Incentives is one way for sure, but working more closely with us in acclimatization of people to the city, jobs for spouses is a big issue, and we have a trend for increased feminization of physicians.
"So we have males and females, and young professionals that need work. We know there are opportunities, but how do we connect that in an appropriate way within a short period of time to really engage and interest new docs to come to the community.
"We've just done a creative problem solving session where we invited a huge number of new residents and undergraduate students from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. We partnered them with new physicians and more experienced physicians and the city. We asked them to come up with a plan on how we could do a better job of collectively recruiting so we really have some good intel on the different ways that we can do that."
Read more on doctor recruitment here: http://www.nbrhc.on.ca/problem-solving-session-for-physician-recruitment/
