By LUCY HARNISH
On Aug. 29, Lori Dale waited nervously at work for a date. She didn’t know much about the person she was about to meet or where she would take them. But Dale hoped she would be able to encourage love at first sight.
Dale’s date was led into the Aspotogan Heritage Trust in Hubbards by Patti Smith, a recruitment consultant for the Nova Scotia Health Authority. The date: a prospective family doctor, and her partner, who are living in Denmark.
Dale greeted the doctor with a big smile and used the short building tour to get to know her.
“I met with them briefly before we went on the tour and asked them a few questions just to get an idea of what they were interested in just so I could know what to show them,” says Dale. “They expressed an interest in the ocean and in the scenery and asked me questions about real estate and proximity to different things in the area and I used that to plan my route.”
After getting the information she needed, Dale took the car keys and all four of them loaded into a rental car. She drove them around the Aspotogan Peninsula to highlight its beautiful ocean views and small fishing communities. She hoped the sights would convince the doctor to make a long-term commitment to Hubbards.
Nova Scotia is experiencing what many consider to be a health-care crisis. As of Oct. 1, the health authority reported that 51,014 Nova Scotians didn't have a family doctor.
Although Dale felt prepared for the tour, she also knew the gravity of the situation. Hubbards, like many communities in Nova Scotia, needs family doctors.
“We recently lost one doctor who closed his practice down and all of these people are without a doctor and there is another doctor, in the only existing clinic, who is set to retire shortly,” she says.
The aim: Love at first sight
On a normal day, Dale works as the information technology and communications director of Aspotogan Heritage Trust, a not-for-profit organization in Hubbards. She spends her days configuring software and troubleshooting connection issues.
But in mid-August the executive director of the organization, Kathryn Gamache, was contacted by the NSHA to ask a staff member to volunteer their time to help with doctor recruitment in Hubbards. Gamache was only able to assist with one doctor tour so the responsibility was passed down to Dale. Now she is trained to field speed dates with doctors not only from Canada, but from all over the world.
“The only task I was given was to welcome the doctor, and her partner, into the community and try to convince them that this would be the place to practice,” she says.
On a doctor recruitment day, a staffer from the NSHA drives doctors from town to town and the pressure is on the community representative to make the doctor fall in love with the area at first sight.
Dr. Farrukh Suhail went through this recruitment process last year. Although Suhail is originally from Pakistan, he first practised as an anesthesiologist in Dublin, Ireland. He was working in Toronto when he first heard about a position at St. Martha’s Regional Hospital in Antigonish.
Suhail was looking for a community where both he and his wife could practise. At the time, Antigonish was their only option.
He and his wife applied for positions on the NSHA’s website and they were soon contacted directly. The NSHA planned a two-day trip for them, with all expenses paid, to familiarize the pair of doctors with the community.
“It was a well-organized tour,” says Suhail. On the first day of the trip, he and his wife visited the hospital where they met the physicians working there. Then they met a real estate agent who showed them homes in the area. The next day they were given a tour of Antigonish. It was smaller than Dr. Suhail was used to.
“I felt good about the process. I liked the hospitality when we came. At one point I thought, it’s hard to say no to them,” he says.
Luckily, Suhail and his wife didn’t disappoint the community because they decided to take the positions at St. Martha’s. Other communities aren’t as fortunate.
“We are all competing against each other, so Lunenburg is looking (for doctors), and Bridgewater, and Shelburne, and Yarmouth, and the Valley, and Cape Breton. ... So we’re all competing. We've just got to portray our community in the best light we can and hope they choose it,” says Lorraine Burch, the general manager of the Our Health Centre in Chester.
Rivals in the game
Chester and Hubbards are about a 15-minute drive apart. They are similar communities insofar as they small towns located near the ocean. Both Dale and Burch would argue that they are very different. But to a doctor that’s new to the area, these differences may not register.
They are all competing communities in this doctor speed-dating game.
“This community has everything to offer, it’s only 45 minutes from the city, it’s a pretty easy sell, unless you’re not someone that could be happy living in a rural setting. This is rural, but not rural as in remote,” Burch says.
Burch has more experience than Dale when it comes to doctor recruitment. While Dale has only met with one doctor, Burch has seen about 12.
In Chester, recruitment days operate differently than they do in Hubbards. Depending on the number of tours scheduled for a given doctor, the health authority plans a luncheon where the doctor will have valuable one-on-one time with practising doctors. Then Burch will give a quick tour of the health centre. Once this is finished a member of Chester municipality will take the doctor on a ride around town.
Burch says this method is proven to work as she has seen the recruitment of about five doctors.
But just because a doctor is recruited to an area doesn’t mean it is happily ever after for the doctor or the community. In Burch’s opinion, many doctors would love to live in a rural area but usually it comes down to whether or not their spouses can find work.
“Doctors are fluid… they come and go,” says Burch. “Two of our doctors loved it here but their husbands could not get work. We can’t control that. If their spouses, or partners, have very specialized careers it is tricky in a rural area.”
Recruitment: It’s complicated
That’s why community representatives have to work so hard to impress doctors. It’s also the reason the NSHA plans as many doctor tours as possible – to find each community their perfect match.
“They’re recruiting all the time, and they get candidates and maybe the candidate will say, ‘Look I just want to live on a farm in the middle of the province,’ or, ‘No I’m a sailor,’ or, ‘No I have kids… they have to be in school and soccer,'” she says. “They match the recruit to where there is openings.”
Patti Smith is a recruitment consultant for the Western zone of the province, which includes part of Yarmouth all the way to Hubbards. She is looking to recruit 21 doctors, including specialists, to her zone.
On her office whiteboard she keeps a running list of out-going and in-coming doctors as well as upcoming tour dates. A lot of her work happens outside the office, so there isn’t much else in it. When she isn’t assisting with tours she is at trade shows.
She says the recruitment process starts with a simple conversation. Smith matches the type of medicine the doctor wants to practise with the communities that have openings. Then the tour planning begins. That’s when Smith reaches out to community representatives to set dates.
Usually, a doctor will view more than one community in a day because they want to cover as much territory as possible. Since Nova Scotia is divided into zones, the doctor could meet multiple recruitment consultants in one trip.
“You can’t make a decision of where you want to spend a bulk of time just by looking at something on the internet. I think you need to come and experience it yourself, in order to be confident in your decision,” says Smith. “The process of getting them here, and having them have that one-on-one time with the other physicians and getting out to see the communities, and touring the schools with the kids… It really does give them, I think, what it would be like to live here.”
Sometimes, there’s no second date
That’s why the role of the community representative is so important. They decide where to take the doctors and put the community’s best face forward.
“Our communities are really great with welcoming in these candidates who are looking at the area and they really do go to bat to make it appealing. They want the site visit to be unique and have them experience all there is to a community,” she says.
Smith has only worked as a recruitment consultant for six months. In that time she has recruited one doctor to her zone. This number does not account for all the doctors that Smith gave tours to that chose to practise in a different zone in Nova Scotia.
“It’s a long game, we have the site visit a good six months or a year before they start their practice,” says Smith.
All of this hard work, and planning, goes into the wooing of one doctor. With all this work also comes a sad truth: not all these communities will get a second date.
In the summer, both Dale and Burch felt the bitter taste of rejection as they met a doctor who decided to practise in Fall River, a suburban community outside of Halifax, rather than in their communities.
“It would be really nice if that doctor came,” says Dale. She hasn’t given up hope. Dale thinks the doctor’s personality would be a great fit for Hubbards.
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