Northern Ontario doctors say there's a rural medicine crisis due to a physician shortage
Physicians call for a made-in-the-north solution to the crisis
Northern Ontario doctors are sounding the alarm on a health care system they say is in crisis, especially in small and rural communities.
The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) hosted an online discussion with OMA president Dr. Dominik Nowak and two northern physicians: Dr. Sarah Giles and Dr. Jessica Kwapis.
Both Giles and Kwapis argue a solution to the health care crisis in northern Ontario, where small hospital emergency departments face frequent closures due to a doctor shortage, needs to be led by the people who work in the north.
"I would invite government from southern Ontario to come up and drive these long stretches of highway and get a sense of how isolated it actually is and imagine what it would be like to live in these small communities," said Kwapis, who is the chief of staff at the Sensenbrenner Hospital in Kapuskasing.
"It is just not the same and there's no substitute for the experience and knowledge of what's going on up here."
Giles, who works as a rural generalist in Kenora, said she gets heart palpitations when she sees her work schedule during the holidays.
"I see my name on it, I see a couple of my colleagues and I see a lot of blank spaces," she said.
"And it's not fair that the entire problem is created by a system that doesn't have enough people or enough money. It comes down on the shoulders of 11 people in my community. We just can't do it anymore. We are exhausted."
The OMA's "prescription" to address the health care crisis in northern Ontario includes reviving and updating incentives to attract more doctors to the north and creating more opportunities for specialist trainees to get rotations in the north.
Giles said Ontario's health care system of the last 10 years won't be around to support people in northern Ontario during the health care crisis.
"It is not good enough to say people live in a rural place, they chose it, it's OK," she said.
"That is urban-centric and has a large degree of racism to it when we consider the First Nations people who live in northern Ontario. We need to look at the problem with compassion and understand there needs to be a generational shift in how we fund health care if we want it to continue as it does."
15K physicians recruited, says province
In a statement to CBC News Hannah Jensen, a spokesperson for the Minister of Health, said the province has added 15,000 new physicians since 2018, which includes a 10 per cent increase in family doctors.
"We have launched the largest medical school education system expansion in 15 years, adding over 100 new undergraduate and residency positions at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, while breaking barriers for internationally educated physicians through programs like Practice Ready Ontario to add 100 new family physicians in rural and northern communities and have made historic investments to expand interprofessional primary care teams, connecting 600,000 more people to primary care across the province," Jensen added.
Jensen cited several initiatives meant to support northern physicians including the Northern Ontario Resident Streamlined Training and Reimbursement Program, Northern and Rural Recruitment and Retention Initiative and the Northern Physician Retention Initiative.