Lumby looking internationally to fill doctor shortage

With nearly 2,000 people left without a family doctor, the village of Lumby is now looking internationally after several efforts to recruit doctors across the country yielded little in the way of results.

“We are working through the process of trying to get an international medical graduate physician,” Lumby and District Health Services Society Chair Ev Read said.

“That has to go through physician recruitment, through Interior Health, and then through them there’s actual organizations for these international medical graduates. They are doctors, they just come from another country. Some of them are Canadian but they’ve trained in another country,” she said.

Those classified as international medical graduates are required to complete two years of service in a rural community.

But the process of recruiting an international medical graduate isn’t so cut and dry and involves interviews with the health society, the prospective doctor, and the international medical graduate program.

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“It’s a process that we don’t have any control over and neither does the physician that comes. We do our interviews and we rate that physician and then the physician does his own rating of the community and both of those ratings papers are submitted to the international medical graduate program and they actually make the decision.”

“So even though if doctor says Lumby is my first choice, it might not necessarily mean that the doctor will be able to come to Lumby,” Read said.

Five international medical graduate prospects are slated for interviews with the Lumby and District Health Society and the organization hopes to have the chosen international doctor working full time at their clinic by early next year.

The village has been grappling with doctor shortages the last six to seven years but this past year, the situation grew critical after Dr. Burnett left the village to pursue another opportunity and another family doctor in Vernon switched to a specialized position, leaving thousands of Lumby residents in the lurch.

“We would love to get anybody, we’ve advertised all over the country for people,” Read said.

Local government pushing for help

Lumby Mayor Kevin Acton told Vernon Matters that the municipality-like many small communities in the province has been actively pushing for increased support in recruiting and retaining rural doctors.

“We’ve written letters to the province we’ve done teleconferences, we met with the Health Minister at UBCM and we lobby the government quite hard for rural doctors,” he said.

Acton notes despite word of other communities offering swanky incentives there are limitations in terms of what municipalities can do to legally entice a doctor to settle in their community.

“As local government it’s actually illegal for us to help a business in the sense of giving money to a business owner to come or make improvements,” he said. “It’s the same with a doctor’s practice, they are a private business, but we can you know encourage.”

Temporary Fix

It’s not permanent, but it’s something.

The nearly 2,000 people left without a family doctor in the Village of Lumby have someone to turn to at least temporarily.

The Lumby and District Health Services Society has recruited a new part-time doctor to their facility who has been working there since the beginning of October.

The new doctor, Dr. Hunsberger will alternate working two days a week one week and three days a week the next until the middle of December.

Patients who previously had Dr. Adam Burnett as family doctor, will now receive care through Dr. Hunsberger as will the rest of those without a family doctor in the village.

A nurse practitioner will also be arriving in the near future to help provide care to patients.

“There’s no firm date on that yet but there will be one coming, we don’t know the duration of that, but a nurse practitioner is a great asset,” Read said.