Initiative designed to entice family doctors to Sarnia-Lambton

An initiative designed to help entice family doctors to practice in Sarnia-Lambton has helped match its first medical graduate with a residency training program.

“She hasn’t made a commitment, but we hope she stays in (Sarnia-Lambton) and she liked the area, which is the goal,” said John O’Mahony about Anum Khalid.

The British Columbia native who graduated from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) spent a month in Sarnia in 2021 as part of the Blue Coast Primary Care visiting electives programwhich offers bursaries for fourth-year medical students to do their elective training in Sarnia-Lambton.

After graduating in 2022, Khalid came back for a year to work as medical director of clinical research at Bluewater Clinical Research Group, run by O’Mahony and Sean Peterson.

The job involves helping with clinical trials, reviewing labs and other aspects of clinical trials work, while also learning from Peterson and O’Mahony through their family medicine practices, O’Mahony said.

“We give a salary, which is equivalent to what a resident would get at Western … just to be exposed to primary care, Sarnia-Lambton and clinical research,” he said.

Most doctors who end up coming to Sarnia-Lambton to practice have some connection to the area, O’Mahony said.

“The ultimate goal … is to try to expose more med students and young physicians to the area in the hopes they stay,” he said.

Blue Coast’s visiting electives program and the “pre-residency” medical director program via Bluewater Clinical Research Group are both geared toward that goal, he said.

Khalid is “a great example of somebody who didn’t have a connection here but now does have a connection after living her for the last 12 months,” he said.

The pre-residency program started with Khalid, who recently matched to Western University for a two-year family residency spot, he said.

Another medical graduate started this week, he said.

He and Peterson also help medical graduates through the six-month application process for residency programs, he said.

Sarnia-Lambton already is short more than 10 family doctors, and a number of physicians are planning to retire who will need to be replaced, Blue Coast Primary Care’s Carly Cox has said.

“I applaud doctors O’Mahony and Peterson for providing these incredible opportunities for medical students,” the physician recruiter said in a news release.

Meanwhile, work to create a family medicine residency program at Sarnia’s hospital continues, said Bluewater Health chief of staff Michel Haddad.

Negotiations have been ongoing for years to create two spots, expanding on two spots that have long been offered at Bluewater Health’s Charlotte Eleanor Englehart Hospital in Petrolia, said Haddad, also regional academic director with Western’s Schulich school of medicine and dentistry’s Lambton-Kent academy,

“It’s a very complex issue with funding from the ministry and the university, and you have to have the educational support and preceptors and educators on site,” he said, adding he’s optimistic the program will get its start in Sarnia.

“There’s been a lot of good work on this, and we continue our efforts,” he said.

O’Mahony said that residency program in Sarnia would be the ideal.

“We’re just doing the best we can in the interim to increase and provide exposure to the area,” he said, noting he’s not aware of any other unofficial pre-residency programs like what Bluewater Clinical Research Group is offering.

Bluewater Health partnered with Schulich in 2019 to create an emergency medicine residency program, Haddad said.

There have been three graduates to date, a hospital group official said.

Graduates are still working at Bluewater Health, Haddad said.

“So, we’re hoping to do the same thing with family medicine,” he said.

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