Here to Learn during Rural Medicine Week
Retired Physician Dr. Bob Henderson Teaching
Article/images by John Campbell
Thurs., June 1, 2023 – Campbellford Memorial Hospital welcomed six first-year medical students to the community last week, hoping their short visit will persuade one or more to return one day to practice medicine locally.
The students, all from the University of Ottawa, spent time in the community as well as at the hospital as part of Rural Medicine Week, arranged through the province’s Rural Ontario Medical Program (ROMP).
The week is important on several levels, said retired physician Dr. Bob Henderson who conducted a two-hour workshop on suturing. Primarily, it’s to expose medical students “to some of the realities of primary care” and how it’s delivered in rural Ontario.
It’s the organizers’ hope that the experience will “|inspire” some of them to choose family medicine when they become doctors and that they will do so in a rural practice, with Trent Hills being their first choice.
“It’s always been a difficult process,” he said, “trying to recruit doctors to a rural environment.” The “great majority … end up in an urban setting, but I am an enthusiast for the joys of rural medicine,” and try to “communicate that when I can.”
Family medicine “provides the widest opportunity for variety in your career,” Henderson said. Looking back on his 45 years in the profession, he did “many different things … as a family physician … (which were) really quite interesting.”
It’s why he says people who go into family medicine are “variety junkies,” they don’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over.
“They want to be involved with children and old people, they want to do palliative care, and they want to deliver babies, some of them want to work emerge. They want all sorts of options.”
Henderson said “the challenges have changed” for doctors since he started out as a physician, with “the biggest challenge (being on) the administration side, keeping up with all the charting (and) paperwork, trying to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks.”
Today’s medical students “have a much better concept of work/life balance than we ever did. So it takes more family doctors to service the same number of patients than it did when I was getting started.”
“The need (for more physicians) is always great,” Henderson continued, and doctors in the area “are working very hard” to keep up with the demand for their services. More doctors are needed not only in family medicine but at CMH as well, working as hospitalists or in emergency, he said.
“I don’t think we’ll ever get to the point where we can say we’re fine, we don’t need anybody else. We have to always be recruiting because things change. People move, and people retire.”
Michele Haddow, medical affairs coordinator for Campbellford Memorial Hospital and the Trent Hills Physician Recruitment and Retention Committee, said there are currently four full-time spots for family physicians open in the community.
“We also need to fill positions (in) the emergency room” and at least one more hospitalist is needed for the in-patient floor, she added.
Henderson said “there’s good research that shows that if you have significant rural input in your educational years, then the likelihood of you ultimately choosing a rural environment is higher.”
Haddow said the provincial government will offer any family physician who sets up practice in Trent Hills $80,000 for a four-year commitment.
The physician recruitment and retention committee works with a $150,000 budget, funded equally by the hospital and the municipality.
Community Development Officer Kira Mees serves as the staff liaison and works closely with Haddow.
The two of them also attend recruitment job fairs to promote physician practice opportunities in Trent Hills. Last year they went to three job fairs, which had been on hold throughout the pandemic.
Mees said “all communities are struggling” with the “human resources crisis” in health care and her role as “community cheerleader” is to promote Trent Hills as the place “where you want to live and work and play.”
The hospital hosted its first Rural Medicine Week in 2002 and continued to do so until 2014.
“It’s a lot of work to actually put together a week like this,” where you have a full schedule and physicians are willing to have students “shadow them,” Haddow said.
It’s “a great learning opportunity” for them, acquiring skills they will use in their studies and later in their careers. ”We’re just planting the seeds of knowledge right now,” she said.
“We’re all very grateful that so much effort was put into this for us,” one of the students, Adrian Salopek, said. He and the others felt “very welcomed by everyone here.”
Shadowing the doctors was a real learning experience, much different from being taught in the classroom, he said. “It sticks with you and you know exactly how to do it next time.”
(The workshop on suturing involved sewing up incisions made in pigs’ feet.)
Salopek hasn’t settled on a career path as yet – family medicine and dermatology being two of his options – but his experience during the week will play a part in helping him to decide, he said.
There are pros and cons to working in big cities and small communities, he said, but “it’s definitely growing on all of us the possibility” of working in places where it’s “calmer” and not as “fast-paced.”
Cara Pilgrim already has her mind made up.
“Definitely rural medicine is where I want to be, so most likely that’ll be family medicine of some sort. But we’ll see.”
She said the week had been “amazing” and she appreciated the opportunity the students had been given to see up close “the different roles that a physician has in a rural community.
“It’s been great to be able to experience how diverse it is in the medical practice here,” she said.
She was also impressed by the community: “I didn’t know how much I would love Campbellford,” she said.”
Trent Hills might want to tweak its motto during Rural Medicine Week.
Come for a visit. Stay for a career.
“I have a feeling we’ll see them return at some point during their residency or future career!” Haddow said in an email afterwards.
