One of three doctors that have announced they'll be opening a practice in North Bay next year, says news about hospital cutbacks and layoffs should not be a disincentive for other doctors to move to the city.
"Not at all, no," Dr. Jonathan Blackadar told BayToday. "I think we're feeling that throughout the province and in North Bay we have a very good structure that we can build on, and build great practices here.
"We're all concerned about things like that because we do have an aging population and we need as much front line health care staff as possible. It's a problem all across the province, and it's going to be a problem for a while."
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Three doctors have announced they will be opening practices early next year called Northern Shores Medical Clinic. They are using online patient intake forms to give them information on people that need a family doctor.
Get the form here.
"They allow us to get a better sense of what people need from a family doctor. It's an information gathering way where we can have a database of people that we can then pull from and then incorporate into the practice.
"Every family practice needs to be well-rounded. If you have a practice with only people that have a ton of chronic medical issues, unfortunately wait times in that type of practice would get very long and nobody would ever get seen. We need to have a well-balanced practice with a mix of people from the community."
Blackadar credits the financial incentives that are available from the city for attracting the doctors to open here, even though the three are all originally from North Bay.
"Without that help, it would have been very, very difficult for us to get the space we need to build the practice we are envisioning."
Their plan is to have 10 to 12 physicians working out of the same office within the next five years.
"We're in a situation where we have family doctors retiring and for the next few years we are going to be doing our best to make as big an impact on the patient population as possible," he explained.
Each doctor will have around 1,200 patients each right off the bat.
And he feels that having a school in northern Ontario to train doctors is working.
"With the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) we are seeing more of an influx of young northern Ontario doctors wanting to come and set up practices, so I'm absolutely optimistic that we're going to be able to make an impact in the next five to 10 years."
All three doctors are graduates of the NOSM.
"In my graduating class alone 78 percent of us ended up in northern Ontario communities. The only reason others aren't back is because they are busy finishing residency programs down south, but they are planning to come back, so it's working."
