More doctors in Lethbridge by fall 2022, committee told

By Al Beeber - Lethbridge Herald on April 28, 2022.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDabeeber@lethbridgeherald.com

Three international physician graduates have signed letters of offer and seven others are pending, the Cultural and Social Standing Policy Committee of Lethbridge city council was told Wednesday.
Dr. Michael Auld, Associate Zone Medical Director of Chinook Regional Hospital, gave the SPC an update about efforts to recruit and retain physicians here.
Auld said in addition to those 10, an 11th graduate will be visiting the city in May and is expected to be offered a position.
Auld is expecting new doctors to be practising in Lethbridge by fall, the delay due to the fact international graduates have to undergo two consecutive three-month assessments by Alberta Health Services, one elsewhere but the second one can be here when the person is working under supervision of another physician.
More than 100 applications were received and 27 candidates interviewed at a cost between $59,000 to $68,000 per sponsored physician, Auld said.
The maximum recruitment pace is two offers per month, depending on the availability of assessors for each of those two consecutive assessments by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta.
Each assessment takes three months, Auld told the SPC whose members include chair Mark Campbell, vice-chair and deputy mayor Jenn Schmidt-Rempel, councillor Jeff Carlson and councillor Nick Paladino.
Councillor John Middleton-Hope was also present while Mayor Blaine Hyggen watched the proceedings online.
The two assessments are arranged by the College of Physicians.
Auld said the uptake from a December meeting was there is a big problem here.
He said AHS is working together with family doctors here, the Chinook Primary Care Network and the City of Lethbridge to solve the problem with all partners owning the problem together.
“From an AHS point of view, there’s three strategies that we’re working with other stakeholders on,” he said.
Opening up positions to sponsorship is something that the College requires AHS to sign off on, said Auld.
Since then “a ton of work has taken place,” said Auld.
The next step after recruiting physicians is to prepare them for practise here.
All sponsorship candidates will chose their own clinic in Lethbridge and are strongly encouraged to use CMA Joule Practice Management resources and courses to help them with that selection which will give them a chance to learn how to manage a practice here and what a clinical practice looks like here, said Auld. This will help them make a decision where they want to practise, he added.
“Our ultimate goal is a balanced workforce of international graduates and Canadian graduates,” Auld told the SPC.
“These are people who are highly motivated,” he said of those who have been recruited here, Auld said.
He said the potential fall start time for the new doctors is “actually pretty good considering what we’ve gone through.”
“As requirement for sponsorship, doctors have been asked to spend time doing something we know we’re having a hard time meeting some needs, such as pain management, chronic pain, child and adolescent mental health, which are areas important here.
“Essentially, that’s what these physicians have been choosing as their area of interest.”
He said a partnership has been made with the City along with Lethbridge Economic Development and the Chamber of Commerce to market Lethbridge as a place doctors want to come to so the numbers of Canadian grads and doctors asking for jobs here will increase.
Auld said “what we’ve learned is if we’re out there offering jobs to Canadian graduates, there may be up to a significant percentage of them that we’ve learned through some of our initial contact through our recruiters, who actually don’t want a job. They want to locum and find a place where they want to live.
“What that means is part of being successful is attracting locums and getting them to keep coming back and eventually decide that they just decide they want to stay here,” said Auld.
Locums are physicians who are maybe interested in working here for a period of time but aren’t interested in being here full-time, Auld said.
Auld told the SPC that in 2019 there were about 24,000 people in the area who were unattached, meaning they did not have a specific medical clinic they could go to.
While it’s been estimated 40,000 people don’t have a doctor here, Auld said a data sharing agreement with primary care networks that can define who unattached patients are has been developed.
A real-time data base is huge, Auld said, “because often times data bases lag about three or six months so we can tell you what happened six months ago; we can’t tell you what’s happened today.”
He said there have been discussions about the actual numbers of unattached patients and while the the PCN estimated it to be upwards of 40,000, “based on this new dashboard when we look at it and some of number projections we have, we know it’s more than 33,000. We know that our attached numbers have gone down since 2019.”

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