Good news.

Completed a residency in PG, eh? And chose to stay here, eh?

And Palopu says what? Coincidence …. mere coincidence ….. ;-)

Having grown up near Mackenzie I know how hard it is to retain medical professionals in smaller communities as realistically what do small communities have to keep medical professionals there. Not a lot. Add to the fact that you don’t see a lot of what you would see in larger centers like PG and after a few yrs medical professionals tend to move to where the action is.

Good luck and hope that At least a few of them stay for many yrs to come.

BCRacer …. I guess you have not been reading Palopu’s version of the whole push to get doctors up here which includes not only the UBC Norhern Medical Program at UNBC, but also the transformation of PGRH to a full fledged teaching hospital for both students and medical residents.

He does not think it will help. I think otherwise. :-)

If there are more doctors in places such as Mackenzie, it will not only make it both safer and more convenient for those people but it will also take some of the pressure off the medical services in PG.

Mackenzie is pretty close to Prince George. Before this point, doctors were traveling from Prince George to keep the clinic open there. This will take a lot of pressure off of the Prince George doctors.

I think the UNBC medical program deserves a lot of credit for this.

Wahoo, Thank you Dan and Colin for choosing smaller communities. This is where a lot of good folks come from….

Thumbs up to the Northern Medical program….

Gus the real test would be to see how many Doctors came to Prince George once they completed the medical program at UBC.

In other words. Before we had the Northern Medical Program, most doctors in the North were from the UBC program. So we can safely assume that hundred of doctors came to Prince George, Smithers, Kitimat, Prince Rupert, Terrace, MacKenzie, McBride, Vanderhoof, Burns Lake, Fraser Lake, etc; etc; etc;.

So in order to maintain the status quo we would have to continue to get a large number of doctors from other areas, or all the graduates of the UNBC program would have to stay in the North.

We know that all the graduates are not staying in the North, so the question is.

How many doctors who complete the UNBC Medical program actually stay in the North, and how would this stack up for the doctor patient ratio if we continued under the old system.

My contention is that unless you can show more than a few doctors staying here, then we are in fact still getting doctors from other areas, and the UNBC program makes little differance to the overall supply of doctors.

Are you suggesting that if the two doctors in question completed their medical training at UBC they would not have chosen to go to MacKenzie??? How would we know. Its obvious that doctors have been going into the North for 100 years more or less.

You are missing a few questions.

One thing is for sure, Prince George rates high on the chart these days for the number of patients per doctor in a Canada wide survey, in the higher quartile if I remember correctly. That was not the case 20 years ago.

Things that changed that would include things such as

1. getting a university here, never mind that it now has a medical program.

2. Changes to make this hospital a teaching hospital from the point of view of residents which happened prior to getting the medical program here.

3. having an actual medical degree program here.

#1 – allows doctors with families to provide an option for their kids and/or spouses to go to university here for some programs, even if it is just an undergraduate degree for those wanting to follow in their parents’ footsteps.

It also allows spouses of doctors to get a job at a university.

#2 – allows graduated doctors to come here for their residencies.

Gives doctors here an opportunity to take on a teaching/mentoring role which makes their practice more interesting.

#3 – provides much greater opportunity to teach med students, not only from here but also from other parts of the country during their clinic periods and possibly even direct lectures.

Attraction is much greater from other locations; retention is much higher so there is not the turnover which required hundreds of doctors to pass through here to keep the numbers up.

The idea is not for all to stay here, we would be overpopulated with doctors in short order, just as we are overpopulated with dental hygienists and GIS technologists etc.

It is simple. It is better for us if we have some of those programs and do not take the point of view that we do not have the population base to warrent such specialty programs. We can export to other communitiesjust as other communities can export to us. We are simply better off if we are in the drivers seat for once instead of others.

It is nice to see that people in the education field and in government are finally starting to understand that.

Gus wins