The City of North Bay and the North Bay Regional Health Centre are in the business of doctor recruitment to the tune of a million dollars.
With ten to twelve thousand North Bay residents currently without a family doctor, no one argues the need for more doctors is urgent.
The reality is every city and town has the same problem.
Filling that need comes with a price, which for the City of North Bay is now over 500 thousand dollars over the next three years.
Council passed a motion Monday to set aside 175 thousand dollars a year, for the next three years, to pay for half the cost of doctor recruitment.
The North Bay Regional Health Centre is matching the money, creating a recruitment fund of over a million dollars.
Mayor Al McDonald says it is simply the cost of recruiting.
“Every new doctor that comes into our community, they’ll get twenty-five thousand dollars from us and twenty-five thousand from the hospital. The hospital is giving them more money on top of that, but the agreement with the hospital on this matter is twenty-five each. And they have to sign an agreement that they will live in the city for five years and they will take on twelve hundred patients.”
McDonald fully supports the plan, and says he’s lobbied for several years to work to recruit more doctors.
He says the money is not new, nor is it tax dollars, as it comes out of money the city is already paying to support the hospital, and actually is bonus money.
“It’s not the property taxpayer that pays for this it’s interest from the North Bay Hydro that is actually paying for this program.”
Council passed the resolution unanimously Monday night, but not without some concerns raised about the cost, and the principle.
Councillor Mark King admitted he was more than a little upset.
“I think it’s a little stronger than not pleased with it. I’m totally upset, and the more I think about it the angrier I get.”
“There were dollars in the economic development department over the last number of years that were there to support this sort of thing. So we’ve gone from ten or fifteen thousand dollars a year to this large amount.”
King says the problem is that the money is being spent by the city, and in his opinion, it should be spent by the province.
King feels the more money the city spends on recruiting doctors, the less the province has to, and the more the province will continue to pass on its responsibilities.
“Something that really is not a municipality’s requirement. It’s the provincial requirement. We shouldn’t be doing it. The more we do it the more they’ll rely on us to do it.”
The mayor agrees, sort of.
“Council is correct this is a provincial issue not a municipal issue. But other than the province coming and saying this area is underserviced they may as well say the province is underserviced.”
“North Bay is the number one choice by new residents. They want to move to North Bay. Some have family where a husband is working somewhere else or a wife is working somewhere else and they don’t want to move to North Bay. And other communities are offering more money than we are. So this just puts us in the game.”
The Mayor points to the successful recruitment of three new physicians ready to set up in North Bay next year, but says those three want to attract seven more doctors here in order to build a stand-alone clinic.
He feels fifty thousand dollars may be just what the doctor ordered.
