One of them would be to reduce the administrative burden and paperwork on doctors, North Perth Mayor Todd Kasenberg suggested Monday during a panel on health care at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) convention in Ottawa.
“I was told by our local family practice team that a physician will spend an average of 19 hours a week on administration, which is beyond me,” Kasenberg shared.
North Perth is about a 45-minute drive northwest of Kitchener and has a population of about 17,000. The departure of a family doctor who joined the public sector as a consultant has resulted in 1,200 people losing their referrals to the medical clinic.
“We estimate that between 3,000 and 5,000 people in the region do not have access to a family doctor,” Kasenberg said.
The latter noted that municipalities are making significant efforts to attract health professionals “because we care about our citizens, and because we face the concern and sometimes the anger of people who have lost their doctor or who are waiting for hours in the emergency room.”
In the north of the province, regions are “highly dependent on travelling health professionals,” shared Dr. Sarah NewBery of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM). Doctors come from outside, from other provinces, and spend a week a month in a region. So they don’t get involved in the community because they don’t participate in committee work or quality improvement work, she said.
“The north has always been the area of the province where human resource challenges are high. We are seeing those challenges increase. We are seeing a significant number of services being closed, particularly obstetrics and emergency, and we are hearing from our clinicians that they are barely coping,” she also shared.
Another strategy, Dr. Newbery recommended, is for recruiters to make sure they know their clientele well when selling their region to future doctors and other health professionals.
“The demographic is increasingly female. Seventy percent of medical students are women,” she said, adding that while hunting and fishing may be selling points, horizons need to be broadened.
Brent Lamming of the City of Sault Ste. Marie believes the financial debt accrued by medical students who choose to move north after studying at NOSM should be forgiven.
“Now the retention rate is 40 to 50 percent. If the debt were eliminated, I’m sure the rate would go up to 70 to 90 percent,” he said.
