The Doctor Recruitment and Retention Committee for the Humboldt area invited members of the community to attend a summit at St. Peter's College in Muenster, January 11.
A progress report, given by committee chair Donna Lyn Thorsteinson, executive director of the Humboldt and District Chamber of Commerce (HDCC), detailed the achievements the committee has made since it was formed in February 2011.
One of the key results from the committee's meetings has been to determine the main issues that pose problems to the doctors currently working here.
"We have identified three issues as being priority," said Thorsteinson. "The first is the 24-hour on-call rotation. So this, coupled with the shortage of doctors, is resulting in an extremely heavy workload for our current practitioners. We have seven physicians that are covering 24-hour emergency along with their regular clinic hours and patients.
"The second issue is the inequality of pay between rural and urban emergency rooms," she said, elaborating how the difference in pay scale affects our local practitioners and would hinder the desire for young doctors to set up practice in a rural health community such as Humboldt.
"And the third issue is the lack of paramedics in our district," she concluded.
At present, Thorsteinson explained, the government does not require or compensate our local ambulance services to have local paramedics on staff, which means a doctor that is working emergency often has to travel in the ambulance with their patient when transferring them, resulting in the emergency room being left without a doctor.
After bringing the public up to date on the committee's progress in 2011, Thorsteinson introduced Vicki Smart and Lori Hinz from Rural Health Operations, Rural Health Services with the Saskatoon Health Region, who gave an update on current staff levels and new recruitment prospects for 2012.
Several locums are in place for 2012, according to Smart, but the process is long when it involves physicians coming from outside the country, who have to write Canadian medical exams or go through an assessment process before they can qualify as practitioners in Saskatchewan.
The next speaker was Brenda Taylor, a senior recruitment consultant for saskdocs.ca, a provincial recruitment agency put in place by the government to streamline physicians for Saskatchewan. Taylor outlined the agency's goals and achievements in the past two years.
"Last year, 23 new physicians went out to rural Saskatchewan for their summer internship," said Taylor. "This year, 50 went out. Part of our mandate is to coordinate rural bus tours such as the one that came to Humboldt last August."
Saskdocs.ca is also doing work with Canadians Studying Abroad, says Taylor. Because three-quarters of the students who apply for medical school in Canada are not accepted, a total of 3,500 Canadian students are studying medicine in 80 different schools around the world.
Although 90 per cent of these students want to come back to Canada to practise, she says very few do, and part of the agency's work is to try and recruit them for our province.
The third health professional that addressed the meeting was Kelvin Fisher, who retires this month from the SHR. The former director of rural health spoke about the principle of offering incentives to physicians to come to the Humboldt area to practise, and about what those incentives should be.
"In the long term, financial incentives don't work," said Fisher, who believes the way to retain new doctors is by being able to offer them integrity in the workplace, respect and sincerity with their colleagues, and by being able to help their transition as well as that of their families, into our community.
"There are other ways of providing incentives," Fisher added. "Other cities are providing accommodation and a car allowance for the first three to six months of their instalment."
Humboldt mayor Malcolm Eaton adjourned the meeting by saying that the challenge for the committee will be in working together to find an innovative solution that will address the criteria that recruiting and retaining young physicians to our area presents.
