DURHAM HOSPITALS TO TRAIN FAMILY DOCS

Anew program between Lakeridge Health and Queen's University will try to address the family doctor shortage in Ontario communities, including in Durham Region.

The program, the details of which are still be worked out, would try to incentivize prospective doctors to become a primary care, or family, physician in underserved communities

Dr. Tony Stone, the chief of staff at Lakeridge Health, said of the new program, "This is a significant addition to what we're currently doing. With the creation of the novel program to train family doctors or primary care docs, the goal is to train folks to be able to become part of communities that are underserviced. The novel training program is something Queen's started developing and we partnered with them in this conversation in the fall."

Lakeridge Health already has a family medicine residency program with Queen's, he said.

"The traditional medical training model is people do four years of medical school and then they do two years of family medicine residence and then they can go on and do another year of other different training," he said.

While in medical school, prospective doctors apply for residency, Stone noted.

"In this program, what's going to happen is applicants are going to be applying for a six-year program, where it's a combined medical school and residency," Stone said.

The catchment area is southeast Ontario, from Durham Region east to the Kingston and Brockville areas.

Underserviced areas has been "a forever problem," he said.

Stone noted prospective doctors who come from a small rural community head off to university, where they could spend at least a decade away from the small community and are exposed to a different lifestyle.

"Suddenly, your life has shifted from where you started," he said.

"The assumption that all those people will go back to where they came from does not consider all the human factors," he noted.

"Our goal is to have the program up and running by the fall of 2023," he said.

The first graduates of the program won't be fully trained until 2029, Stone added.

"This is going to be novel and I think it's the first of its kind in Ontario," he said.

Dr. Tony Sanfilippo, Senior Advisor, Educational Expansion and Innovation for Queen's Health Sciences, said the program is "very important for Queen's. Queen's wants to take on what is probably the biggest items in health care in Canada and that is the shortage of physicians in many communities."

It's something medical schools should feel a responsibility for, he added, noting, "Queen's is recognizing that and this program is part of the effort to do that."

The university is always looking to create new programs that are unique, Sanfilippo noted.

"This is something that will be innovative. It's something that addresses a lot of long-standing issues with medical education," he added.

The lack of family physi

cians is impacting everyone, not just the health care system, he said.

Queen's is expanding its medical school admissions by adding 20 new positions. The university now has 108 positions.

Lakeridge Health is the "ideal place for this kind of education, because of the integrated hospital system you have there, the growing population you have

there, the mixture of larger and smaller communities. In a lot of ways, it's an ideal place to do this," Sanfilippo said.

He said students will be spending a significant amount of time in the community, working with patients.

"They'll understand better what community medicine is about and begin to feel part of that communi

ty. That, we think, will make it more likely that they will continue to practice in that community," Sanfilippo said.

"I see this not as a onetime infusion, but as a continuing process. I can see a community that is having problems retaining family physicians over the year engaging this program and always having someone in the pipeline," he noted.