Communities compete to attract physicians.

• Author: Krejlgaard, Chris

Smaller communities in Northern Ontario have found themselves not only competing against southern Ontario cities and towns, but also against each other in their effort to attract general practitioners.

"No one wants to come to Northern Ontario," complains Emo Reeve Jim Stewart, a member of the community's recruitment committee.

While the Ministry of Health and the Ontario College of Physicians say there are too many doctors in the province, Northern Ontario communities such as Englehart, Iroquois Falls, Smooth Rock Falls and Emo are losing their general practitioners.

Since May, Englehart has had only two of the four doctors it requires to adequately serve the local population.

Iroquois Falls lost three of its four full-time physicians during a six-month period.

In Smooth Rock Falls the community has lost two doctors.

The hardest hit has been Emo which, until recently, had to get by with temporary doctors.

Stewart says Emo lost all three of its doctors during the span of a few years. The last of the three left in June 1990.

However, Emo recently beat out Englehart in an effort to attract one physician from Salt Lake City, Utah. The physician was expected to start work in Emo this month.

While noting that better air connections between Salt Lake City and Emo were a factor in the American doctor's decision, Stewart says the deciding factor was the town's predicament.

"I think the big thing was that we had no doctors and Englehart had two," he explains. "He (the doctor) knows that he can come in and really be able to start making a contribution."

The problem of recruiting and retaining general practitioners is most apparent in the fly-in communities of the far north. In a declining scale, rural areas are somewhat better off, and the north's five larger centres have the least trouble attracting general practitioners.

The problem is that the north's smaller, remote communities are perceived as isolated, with few educational opportunities and fewer professional opportunities for spouses, according to Hugh Drouin, the health co-ordinator for the Ministry of Health's Northern Health Office in Thunder Bay.

"We're optimistic that if we can get a doctor here, then we can hold him," responds Stewart. "We're not as isolated as we once were. We're accessible to all the major centres."

However, it is also perceived that the workload is much greater in smaller communities.

"You're on call 100 per cent of the time," says Dan O'Mara, chief executive officer...