Digby’s young medical students

By Jonathan Riley

DIGBY COURIER

NovaNewsNow.com

Medical students from Digby say they would consider practicing here… for the right offer.

Health Minister Chris D’Entremont said last week on the radio that the Nova Scotia government is considering paying the tuition of some medical students who agree to stay in the province – either working in under-serviced rural areas or under-serviced specialties.

“I was planning to go away for a couple years, maybe to a city,” says Brandon Turnbull, a second year Kinesiology student at Dalhousie University in Halifax. “I want to get away for a bit and experience something different.

“But I love it here. I grew up here and it would be good to come back and give something back to my community.

“I would definitely take an offer like that. School is so expensive and if they are going to fund it, why not?”

Michelle Treleaven has always known she wanted to be a doctor. She just graduated from Digby Regional High School and will be starting a Bachelor of Science degree at Dalhousie in the fall.

Her plan right now is to become a family doctor and maybe specialize in pediatrics. She thinks “return-for-service contracts” like the government is proposing are generally a good idea but she’d have to see the specific contract.

“I think it is a good way to appeal to potential doctors but it would depend on the contract. I like the one year for one year idea – that’s fair – but I wouldn’t want to make a decision at 21 about a contract that is going to affect me for years and years.

“It could be a bit like Rumplestiltskin – they give you something nice up front and then ask for payment later.”

Michelle would also worry that coming to Digby would make it hard for her to specialize.

“It would be good if they came up with a way to do your residency here – cause wherever you do that is usually where you start out.”

Amanda Walker is going into her second year of a Bachelor of Science (in Neuorscience and Biochemistry) at Memorial University in Newfoundland.

She wants to specialize in cardiac surgery.

“I’d love to come back to Digby but are they going to have cardiac units in rural hospitals?

“Digby used to do day surgeries, deliver babies – if all these services were opened up and this could be a full-fledged hospital, it would be a lot more attractive place to work.”

She also says she would find it hard to leave after a few years.

“If you come here for a couple years and say you took the place of Dr. Harding and were responsible for 3,000 patients – the guilt of leaving after a year or two would make it pretty difficult.

“With my ethics, I’d feel pretty terrible when the time came to pick up and go and further my career.”

Ian Bowers is the director of physician services with the Nova Scotia Department of Health.

He says the ultimate goal is find students who aren’t going to leave when the contracts are up.

“The biggest fear we hear about is the fear of coercion, that they will be forced into specialties or areas they are unsuited for.

“There would be a process involving the students, let’s says districts X, Y, Z have the biggest need – and we have a student from X who wants to go there and work – the process would look at need and best fit.

“We want to match good people with specialties they’d be good at, in places they’d be happy.”

Nova Scotia started using return-for-service contract with 8 postgraduate spaces they recently began funding. The residency spaces are reserved for foreign–trained doctors who agree to stay in Nova Scotia.

New Brunswick currently funds 20 undergraduate seats at Dalhousie but in 2009 those 20 seats will be moved to a New Brunswick site. Nova Scotia and the Dalhousie are talking about the possibility of Nova Scotia funding either some or all of those seats.

D’Entremont said he would like to see Nova Scotia fund those seats on a return-for-service basis. The minister was not available for comment last week.

Bower says the contracts will have a great deal of flexibility and will probably allow students to practice in any of the Atlantic Provinces without penalty.

“We wouldn’t penalize them for example for going to New Brunswick and we trust that if one of their students wanted to practice here, that New Brunswick wouldn’t penalize them.”