Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I’d like to follow up on the questions that were asked by my colleague Mr. Bouchard, from Hay River North, regarding the lack of resident physicians in Hay River.
This is not a new problem. This has been ongoing for some time. I know the health authority does the best they can with getting locums, and some of the locums are actually rotating in and out on a six-week in/six-week out basis, which is certainly better than no continuity. So I do commend the efforts of the health authority to try and address this difficult situation.
The Minister referred to the challenge that physicians we would like to potentially recruit may not want to live in smaller, remote communities, which I guess Hay River would still be considered remote. I’d like to ask the Minister what currently exists at the departmental headquarters level to assist the regional authorities with recruitment efforts.
We used to have a full-time person on staff in Hay River who did recruitment, but what overarching, territorial, department-wide emphasis or initiative is there within the department to help us find resident physicians? Thank you.
Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The Minister of Health, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Health has been working with the Department of Human Resources and has recently hired a health human resource specialist responsible for the development and creation of a specialized recruiting and retention strategy program. This strategy is aimed at increasing the number of physicians in rural communities. Thank you.
That’s very interesting. It sort of sounds like things we might have done before. Can the Minister confirm that this is something new, innovative, creative, outside of the normal things we’ve done in the past to try and recruit physicians? Thank you.
Yes, it’s recent. It’s something that we’re attempting to do in order to help, for example, the Hay River Health and Social Services Authority to recruit physicians that can live in Hay River. Thank you.
In his previous comment, the Minister indicated that the compensation package for resident physicians, locum physicians are very competitive, that money is not the issue, it is just trying to get the people to come and take up practice here in the North.
As we know, the practice of medicine has changed. It isn’t like it was in the old days when doctors were on call 24/7 in a small town. We recognize that and we respect that. Would the Department of Health and Social Services be willing to pay an organization such as a private, independent organization? They call them headhunters. When departments and corporations need specialized employees in their organizations, they will pay a fee to a headhunter to find, identify, locate and get people to move to where the jobs are. Is this something that the department would be willing to pay for? Thank you.
The issue of money was that it was not an issue of money in recruitment as opposed to salaries. When I referred to that, it was not an issue of money, it was an issue of getting people to come. I’m sure if we paid anybody enough money, they would come. But this is something that the department would consider. I would say that we would have to work with the various health authorities. One of the things that we are actually contemplating is trying to create one pool that can be shared by the entire Territories and an option to that could be going out to find recruiting people that do headhunting to find people and positions that are hard to recruit in locations where they’re hard to recruit in. Thank you.
I don’t think anybody can promote Hay River more or better than those of us who live there, call it home and really, really like it there. So I’d like to ask the Minister what role involvement could he conceive of that the community could become more involved, the MLAs could become more involved, that we would have some point of contact with the people who are trying recruit so it isn’t just a recruiting and kind of an abstract way, but to a specific community with a specific set of things going for it like a place like Hay River. Thank you.
I actually thought about that, having lived in Hay River myself many, many years. I actually thought, you know, it’s a really nice place to go. I don’t understand myself why we’re having difficulty recruiting doctors to live there.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake.
