New partnership aims to bring more doctors to Sarnia area

A unique partnership between Bluewater Health and London’s Western University aims to encourage more new doctors to consider settling and working in the Sarnia area.

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Starting in fall 2025, eight third-year medical students from London’s Schulich school of medicine and dentistry will be able to complete most of their clerkship in Sarnia and Petrolia, in hopes connections they may make pay off when they seek a community to settle in after their training’s done.

Michel Haddad, Bluewater Health’s chief of staff, said the new project was several years in the making.

“We’ve been working on increasing the links between (the) Schulich school. . . at Western and Bluewater Health for a long time,” he said.

That led to a family medicine residency program in Petrolia that recently grew from two placements to three.

“That has been very successful,” Haddad said. “Many of the residents who trained there ended up working in the community.”

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Other medical students and residents also have spent time at Bluewater Health “but tend to come in for short-term rotations – two weeks or four weeks,” he said.

“Over the last two or three years or so, we have been entertaining the idea with the university of having students based here for longer periods,” Haddad said.

Usually, the first two years of the medical school program are in classrooms with “clerkship rotations” in the third and fourth years, mainly in London and Windsor where its campuses are, he said.

“Now we’re going to have eight of those students based here in Sarnia for the whole year” and that could expand to include their fourth year of medical school, Haddad said.

During that time, they will rotate between emergency, family medicine, surgery, internal medicine, psychiatry and other departments.

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“They’ll get to form links with both the medical community and the community at large, in hopes that one day they’ll. . . come back and work here,” he said.

“Working with our community health-care partners, we are finding new ways to address the health-care crisis. . . , particularly in rural and regional areas,” Dr. Victor Ng, Schulich’s assistant dean of distributed education, said in a release.

“Not only is it a wonderful, immersive training experience for the students, it will also ultimately help to build capacity in the region,” he added.

Dr. Noranda Nuholt said her clerkship rotations in Sarnia were instrumental in her decision to open a family practice in Sarnia in 2016.

“Smaller centers can be a hard sell for students who don’t know them, but there is so much opportunity here,” she said in the release.

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A similar clerkship project is used in northern Ontario but it’s less common in southern Ontario, Haddad said.

“We’re sort of leading the way to start that in Southwestern Ontario,” he said. “Hopefully, that will be a model for other communities down the road.”

Along with a donation the medical school received, which is helping the project, Bluewater Health has invested in renovations and technology to accommodate the year-long clerkships, Haddad said.

There has also been “buy-in” from local physicians who will be involved, he said.

Bluewater Health has been “doing well” at physician recruiting for a hospital of its size, but shortages remain in family medicine, psychiatry and pediatrics, Haddad said.

An early positive sign is that 19 Schulich students signed up for a September road trip to Bluewater Health organized to gauge interest in the new clerkship program.

“There’s a lot of interest,” Haddad said.

And work is underway to see if the Petrolia family medicine residency program can be “replicated” in Sarnia.

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