Bluewater Health recruits more pediatricians

More pediatricians are expected to arrive in Sarnia soon as Bluewater Health deals with a shortage.

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“We haven’t had any gaps in coverage, but our goal is to have people who are always here,” said Dr. Michel Haddad, chief of staff.

One full-time pediatrician works at the hospital, and others have been filling in as needed from surrounding hospitals to cover for things like vacation, he said.

Hopes are to have three more part-timers this fall, Haddad said, bringing the full-time equivalent to 2.5.

“It’s essential for the well-being of the entire (maternal infant child) program,” he told hospital board directors in June, noting that includes delivering babies, intensive care and emergency room support.

Nothing has been finalized yet, he said.

Bluewater Health has had three full-time equivalent pediatricians in hospital, and recently received Health Ministry approval for up to five, under a new funding model, Haddad said.

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Called the alternative funding plan, the model’s stability “makes it more enticing to recruit,” he said, adding longer-term goals are to have a five-pediatrician complement with hospital privileges.

Some who used to work in the high-acuity hospital environment, including providing weekend and after-hours coverage, have been focusing more on community care in recent years, he said.

“Many of the pediatricians in the past have given us a lot of years of service, and some of them are winding down or slowing down,” he said.

Provincially meanwhile, it’s been one of the toughest specialty positions for hospitals to recruit, he said.

“Not just us.”

The reasons are many, but Haddad said more pediatricians in training are opting for sub-specialties like rheumatology or gastroenterology, making them less suited to community hospital settings like Sarnia’s, where there isn’t enough demand for hyper-specialized care, he said.

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Another position that’s been in demand for years at Bluewater Health is psychiatry, with another three on the hospital group’s wish list, Haddad said.

“And even though nationally there’s a struggle to recruit physicians in all specialties, we’ve been on average doing better than our peer hospitals to get many specialists,” Haddad said.

“Pediatrics, psychiatry, those two stand out as being difficult to fulfill in the whole province and country, but we’re doing our best.”

Bluewater Health has also been expanding residency and medical student training programsto increase the number of doctors in training with community connections, he said.

Plans are to expand a family medicine residency program in Petrolia to three spaces, from two, he said.

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“And we’re hoping to replicate that in Sarnia, so we double up our family medicine spots here, in addition to having medical students who eventually, we’re hoping, would choose to, when they graduate, train and stay in the community.”

There was no effect on recruitment from a cyberattack last fall that crippled Bluewater Health’s systems, he said.

A silver lining, in fact, is it prompted fast-tracking to a new Oracle Cerner hospital information systemfor things like electronic medical records, used at hospitals in places like Windsor, Chatham-Kent and London, Haddad said.

Having that parity, when the new system is scheduled to take effect in November, will likely make it easier to recruit “because physicians graduating from those areas are more used to that system,” he said.

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@tylerkula

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