Eight trainee doctors earmarked for Baffin region

Speaking at a Feb. 22 news conference in Iqaluit, Tagak Curley praises a new partnership between the Qikiqtani General Hospital program and Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland which will see eight residents from Memorial University’s medical school spend two years in Iqaluit. (PHOTO BY JIM BELL)

This July, as many as eight fledgling doctors will be able to come to Iqaluit to practice medicine at the Qikiqtani General Hospital and in communities throughout the Baffin region.

And they won’t stay for just a short time, as many doctors do, but for a period of two years, allowing them to get better acquainted with their patients and gain the experience they need to become qualified family physicians.

The plan is financed through a six-year $4.6-million program called NunaFam, announced Feb. 22 in Iqaluit by federal health minister Leona Aglukkaq, who said the program was “good news” for Nunavut and Nunavimmiut.

The money will also help establish a new family practice training centre at the Qikiqtani hospital.

“This is a very important investment as these locally trained physicians will give Nunavut families greater access to health care,” said Tagak Curley, Nunavut’s minister of health and social services.

The new centre will be staffed by young medical residents who are recent graduates of Memorial University in St. John’s, whose medical school is known for its training of northern family doctors who work in Labriador.

Aglukkaq said she hopes many of the residents will decide to remain in Nunavut after their two-year stay.

“Once people move here it doesn’t take people long to fall in love with the place,” she said, emphasizing that “our goal is to keep them here.”

That goal is shared by Dr. James Rourke, dean of medicine at Memorial University, who said the long term partnership would be a ”pipeline” for new doctors to practice in Nunavut.

“I think we‘ll have a long-term impact far beyond the eight residents,” he said.

Right now, the Government of Nunavut budgets for 21 full-time family physician positions. Right now, about 12 of those are filled. Two or three others are filled by southern doctors on short-term locums, while the others remain vacant.

The NunaFam project is intended to help Nunavut recruit and retain more full-time family doctors for these hard-to-fill full-time jobs.

Nunavut now feels the country’s doctor shortage much more acutely than southern Canadians, a study by Conference Board of Canada revealed earlier this year.

In a project called “Somebody Call a Doctor,” researchers used 2006 census data to determine that the population-to-physician ration in the North can be 2,000 to one and even higher, depending on the region, compared to 400 to one in southern regions.

The region with the fewest number of doctors per 10,000 population is northern Saskatchewan (3), followed by Nunavut (5), and then northern Newfoundland and Labrador (8).

Most southern regions of Canada have at least 20 doctors for every 10,000 people.