Health authority bulks up doctor recruitment team

The Nova Scotia Health Authority is expanding its physician recruitment team in an effort to attract badly-needed GPs and specialists to the province.

Typically the winter season is a bit of a "dry spell" for recruitment, said Grayson Fulmer, the senior director of medical affairs for the NSHA, but this season has been a busy one so far.

Right now, the recruitment team consists of five people: four recruitment consultants and one recruitment assistant.

The health authority is planning to bolster the team by hiring two more recruitment consultants and another assistant who will work in the Halifax office. As well, the NSHA is still trying to fill the position of recruitment director.

"It's an extremely important position," Fulmer said Monday. "We're looking for someone who has a lot of experience in strategic oversight of large-scale recruitment."

Adding more people to the recruitment team will allow the staff to not only try to attract physicians, but also to spend more time helping doctors get settled within the first year of moving to the province.

"Where we want to really invest the time and effort is that candidate experience coming in," Fulmer said. "That whole orientation, that first year in practice is key, and that's where we want to make some investment moving forward."

Still 75 vacancies for family physicians

Last year, between April 1 and Nov. 30, 100 new physicians started in the province, Fulmer said. Forty-nine of those physicians were family doctors and 51 were specialists.

In the previous fiscal year, the NSHA recruited 103 physicians for the entire year. There are still about 75 vacancies for GPs and about 59 for specialists.

"Obviously, we want to move forward and get to a position where we're filling all of those vacancies as well as planning ahead for all of the retirements that we know are coming," Fulmer said.

"As always, we always want to focus on Canadian-trained physicians, so we have a presence at all the med schools and residency programs across Canada. And we're doubling up our efforts to focus on our homegrown-trained residents here at Dal."

Karen Mattatall is the mayor of Shelburne and chairs the Rural Nova Scotia Health Care Crisis Working Group, which is made up of people from Mahone Bay to Digby.

She said she has not come into contact with recruiters if they are working in her area.

She said people in Shelburne have to travel roughly 100 kilometres for many medical services, including dialysis and giving birth. She is not confident any recruitment efforts have changed the delivery of services in her community.

"It doesn't reassure me. It will reassure me when I see it happening when I see doctors coming here, when I see services coming here that support the patients that require them.

"For me, health care and access to it should be the No. 1 priority. If that's something that the government is going to own and control, then they really need to make sure that every resident of Nova Scotia has appropriate access."

The NSHA saidits recruiters are concentrating on countries which have reciprocal licensing agreements with the provincial college of physicians and surgeons. That's primarily the United Kingdom, as well as the United States, Ireland, Australiaand New Zealand.

Family medicine is at the top of the list of needed people. Psychiatry and anesthesia are also top needs.