Facing a shortage of doctors, P.E.I. also can't find people to recruit them

In charge of a health-care system in dire need of more staff, P.E.I. Health Minister Mark McLane says there's also a shortage when it comes to the people trying to hire doctors 

"We do have staffing issues in recruitment too," he said in an interview with CBC News on Monday. "We have lost a senior physician recruiter. We have, I think, five or six empty positions and like any industry, we've had some turnover in staffing and recruitment over the last year or two."

Nearly half of the positions on P.E.I.'s medical professional recruitment team are either vacant or occupied by people who are on leave, McLane said.

The latest vacancy came after a heated town-hall meeting in Summerside earlier this month, the minister said, when one staff member left to go to a different provincial department.

"I think they do feel the pressure," he said. "I would say, 'Let's be tough on issues, not tough on people.' … I don't know if it's fair to to target public sector employees."

Prince County Hospital in spotlight

At that town hall, hundreds of area residents turned out to protest a gradual whittling away of services at Prince County Hospital as more and more medical staff left and couldn't be replaced.

The mood grew especially heated when Derek Key, the former chair of the Health P.E.I. board, said he knew of some Island medical students studying on the mainland who weren't contacted by the health department despite their ties to P.E.I. and their interest in working in their home province.

Since then, CBC News has learned of other people who said recruiters did not reach out to them after they made inquiries about employment.

McLane said the department is not aware of any medical students in the position Key described, but he can see how mismatches can occur when the department itself is also short-staffed in recruiters.

He said he finds it surprising that the recruitment team wouldn't follow up with any physician asking about work.

"I think sometimes maybe the messaging might be that we can't offer them what they want," he said.

Names of students not provided

McLane said he had a discussion with Key after the town-hall meeting, but could not convince him to provide the names of the students to whom he had been referring.

The minister said his department is in contact with representatives who deal with students enrolled at various university medicine faculties, but privacy concerns mean provincial officials don't have access to the universities' lists of medical students.

Last October, McLane said, P.E.I. recruiters established connections with 182 students during recruitment events at Memorial University in St. John's and Dalhousie University in Halifax, and sent follow-up emails to 90 per cent of them.

The minister went on to say his department is collaborating with five professional recruitment firms in its quest to find and hire new medical staff, but said they are operating in an "extremely competitive marketplace" and face constraints.

Those constraints could include the need to relocate physicians' families when they accept a job on P.E.I. and the time it takes to verify licences for professionals trained abroad, he said.

Islanders worried, says MLA

Liberal MLA Gord McNeilly said he is always hearing from Charlottetown–West Royalty constituents who are worried about not having access to health care, whether it's from a family doctor or in the emergency room.

"We are in a health-care crisis and we can't even recruit the recruiters to recruit the health-care professionals?" was his response to hearing about the vacancies.

Of the recruiting snags and allegations of politics getting in the way of how Health P.E.I. is trying to operate, he said this problem "didn't happen in the last three weeks; it got exposed in the last three weeks."

McNeilly added that if a lack of continuity is to blame for missed opportunities to hire for P.E.I. jobs, there's a deeper issue at play. "Why would a recruiter want to come to P.E.I. when there is meddling going on at the highest level?"

Two weeks ago, the former CEO of Health P.E.I., Dr. Michael Gardam, told a legislative committee that at times Premier Dennis King's office had interfered with his work, especially when it came to his reservations about P.E.I. setting up a new medical school.

The next day, King told CBC News that Gardam "would be reminded from time to time by the chief of staff or the clerk of executive council that this is government policy that we're moving forward with, and part of his duties as the CEO of Health [P.E.I.] is to implement the policies of the executive branch of government."