By Charles Lefebvre

Rural health care focus of two-year residency

Jun 26, 2019 | 4:18 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB — Seven aspiring doctors arrived in Medicine Hat Wednesday to begin a two-year residency program that will see them working in both urban and rural offices.

The residents are part of the University of Calgary’s Family Medicine Rural Program. In addition to working at the Medicine Hat Regional Hospital, the residents will be rotated to smaller communities in southern Alberta.

“They learn rural family medicine for family medicine, emergency obstetrics, they’ll get to do general surgeries psychiatry, intensive care, they do a lot of different rotations pertaining to rural family medicine,” said Cassy Sinclair, the site coordinator for Medicine Hat.

“Our focus is to make our residents and our future doctors generalists that can do absolutely anything and everything,” said Dr. Kristine Woodley, a general practitioner in Medicine Hat.

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The program also runs in Lethbridge. Smaller communities where residents practice include Pincher Creek, Brooks, Bassano, Bow Island and Oyen.

Woodley graduated from the program six years ago, coming from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.

“I had a very strong rural focus from the start,” she said. “I interviewed across the country, and the Medicine Hat and the Lethbridge Programs were the top programs on my list, because it’s a really strong program that prepares you to work rurally. My first five years or practice, I worked in (emergency) I did obstetrics, I really did everything possible for a physician to do, and that’s what this program prepares you for.”

Woodley and Sinclair both say the program can help rural communities find and maintain doctors and health professionals.

“Most of the residents who come through this program know that they want a rural focus, that they want to work in a smaller town,” she said. “I think the nice thing, once you join a residency program, is that you get exposure to communities that you wouldn’t have seen before. And this is the number one way we can recruit physicians to stay in small communities. You give them the experience they need, you give them the time to get to know a community and get to work with different people, and that’s how they stay.”

“A lot of people will come here and train just because of the capacity of the program and the knowledge of the program, and a lot of them will take that knowledge and actually move elsewhere,” said Sinclair. “We’ve been very fortunate where a lot of the physicians have actually stayed in rural Alberta.”

According to Alberta Health Services, of the 14 doctors who completed the program from 2017 to 2019, all have remained in a rural practice following graduation. Two have moved to Saskatchewan, two have moved to Ontario, while the rest are in Alberta.