Richard Froese
Smoky River Express

Recruiting physicians seems to be an uphill battle for rural areas, including the Smoky River region. Now that the Physician Recruitment and Retention for the Smoky River Region committee has been revived, the focus group of committed people can forge ahead to do all it can to recruit physicians. Like anything else you want for your community, get active in the process. If you want a physician in your community – region – get involved by serving an active role with the regional committee. Working together as one big community – one region – can attract physicians, other medical staff, and other labourers to our community. A news feature recently on The National on CBC-TV interviewed a professional recruiter for Kingston, Ontario, who says that it takes about 300 hours to recruit one physician. That is probably not collective hours, but actual hours, such as 15 people attending one meeting for two hours is actually two hours, not two hours times 15. So it takes a lot of hard work, and probably some luck. It takes a community – a region – to recruit Recruiting a physician or employees in other fields involves coordination, communication, and cooperation, and finding the right person with the right fit into the community. Much of these recruiting and retention components have already be constructed by the committee before it somehow dissolved in November 2005. Some people love the small-town rural life, others love life in the big city. With the physician shortage in Canada and world-wide becoming more critical, many professional physician recruiters are being hired by health regions and large cities. During the physician feature on The National, one candidate said she was attracted to a city by the selling job of the recruiter. Recruiting is all about selling your community – your region. Each of us has strengths to help build our community – a healthy community. A healthy community includes sufficient adequate medical staff, facilities, and services. Share your strengths, ideas, and resources with your community, and with the regional recruitment committee. Together we can build our community – region – and recruit and retain physician and other labourers. Let’s ensure that we warmly welcome and embrace physicians when they consider our community as their home and place of work. However, we must also be cautious that we don’t over-welcome them and treat them as first-class citizens which may leave the perception that other people are not welcome, and become second-class or third-class citizens because they are not given the same royal welcome. Let’s raise the profile of health care during Rural Health Week from June 17 to 23 under the theme “Improving Access to Rural Health Services” planned by Alberta Rural Physician Action Plan. Rural Health Week offers opportunities for community partners to focus attention and to raise awareness annually about both the challenges and success stories related to rural health. Rural health service delivery faces some unique challenges not seen in urban areas – large geographic distances, access to health services, and issues related to recruitment and retention of rural health workers. Despite its challenges, rural health care delivery has many innovations and success stories. The majority of Albertans, however, generally hear only of the success stories related to urban health care. According to the 2001 Census, about 925,000 or 31 per cent of Alberta’s total population of 2,974,807 is rural based. Statistics Canada defines “rural” as being the population living in towns and municipalities outside the commuting zone of larger urban centres with a population of 10,000 or more. Access to quality health services contributes to the quality of life for rural Albertans.

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