The Bonnyville Covenant Health Centre has greatly benefitted from the local community's drive to recruit and retain new physicians.
Over the past year the local hospital has seen two new physicians join the fold, with another one set to start on June 21 and two more coming before the fall.
The influx of new physicians is thanks to the quick work of the Covenant Health Centre, Town of Bonnyville and MD of Bonnyville. The three sides joined forces and created the physician recruitment and retention committee in August of 2014.
The program has showed immediate success with six new physicians agreeing to come to Bonnyville within the first six months of the committees operations.
Even though the committee has successfully solved the community's doctor shortage, officials wanted to ensure the group has the funding needing to keep enticing new doctors to town when needed.
A fundraiser was held this past weekend in the form of a golf tournament at the Bonnyville Golf and Country club. Ducharme Motors revived their annual tournament after a one-year absence and rounded up over 100 golfers to come out and swing for doctor recruitment dollars.
“We had to come up with a system to make doctor recruitment sustainable,” said Reeve Ed Rondeau. “This is the venue we chose. This is the first (tournament) of hopefully very many.”
Both the Town of Bonnyville and MD of Bonnyville donated $15,000 each towards to the tournament and doctor recruitment program, starting the tournament organizers off with $30,000 raised.
Including registration fees and silent auction items officials at the tournament were well on their way to smashing the $40,000 barrier in tournament proceeds.
“If we could build up a little nest egg that would be great,” said Rondeau. “Then that gives the committee enough money to proceed on an annual basis without having to skimp or find additional funds.”
That is exactly what local physician Dr. Henrik van der Watt was hoping for when he approached both the Town and MD about the possibility of creating this committee.
Fortunately for him both councils were on board immediately and the idea grew rapidly.
“We have had incredible support. We went to (both councils) and asked them for financial help to get some new physicians here,” said van der Watt. “Within a week a meeting was called they came on board with all of the recommendations we had and have since superseded that.”
The community joined forces to help the Covenant Health Centre out of what van der Watt referred to as “crisis mode” after several physicians left the community in a short period of time.
By the time the fall rolls around the local hospital will have six new doctors on board since the inception of the program, something that pleases van der Watt.
“Currently I think in the Bonnyville and greater MD area there are still about 2,000 patients without a family doctor,” said van der Watt. “Furthermore the waiting times for people to get in a see their family doctor is quite long. Getting these physicians in is going to really help with that.”
Along with recruiting physicians to town the committee goes above and beyond to try and keep the doctors working in the community for an extended period of time.
The three sides have also thrown $50,000 each into a pot, which is used to offer loans to new doctors moving to Bonnyville so they can put a down payment on a house. The thought is if they own property in town they are going to stay here.
Van der Watt also says the committee's goal is to sell Bonnyville and the sense of community to doctors when they arrive.
“The big thing with this committee is we are trying to sell a sense of community,” said van der Watt. “I initially came here for what I thought was a short period, but it is an incredible place to live and we just need to get that message across to the physicians and hopefully they will stay.”
The first annual tournament went off without a hitch on June 12, with event organizer Greg Ducharme happy to help the local committee out.
“I think it is a great idea on a lot of levels,” said Ducharme. “We all need to use the emergency once in a while and right now for anyone new to the area getting a family doctor has been tough. If we get recruit more doctors to the area it just makes the transition to living in our area even easier.”
Along with recruiting and retaining new doctors the committee is going to look to allocate some funds to encourage local youths to entre the medical fields, in hopes that those doctors will come back and work in their hometown.
“I am looking forward to a few good years and hopefully we can maintain a good set of doctors around town,” said Rondeau. “We have a good selection of doctors but we would like to get to a point were everyone can have a doctor.”
