Incentives attract visiting doctors to northern Ontario ER’s, but they’re not sticking around | CBC News

It’s a program that has successfully kept emergency rooms operating in northern Ontario through COVID, but some say the Temporary Locum Program may be working against recruiting efforts that would provide a lasting fix to the doctor shortage.

During COVID, the provincial government started paying premiums to traveling doctors in northern Ontario.

The goal of the program, which has been renewed several times, was to keep hospital emergency rooms staffed through the pandemic when there was a lack of existing family physicians.

The program, last renewed last fall, is set to expire once again at the end of the March. 

Doctors and administrators across the north say they still depend on locums to keep emergency rooms open.

But they also say the premium paid to visiting doctors works against them in recruiting full-time doctors to their communities. 

Ann Fenlon is the medical recruitment and retention coordinator in north Algoma, which includes the Lady Dunn Health Centre in Wawa. 

She says they have three physicians, where the province says there should be seven.

Fenlon says at first, she thought the temporary locum program would help recruit doctors, but it hasn’t turned out that way.

She says she doesn’t have any trouble scheduling locums, with a pool of about 40 to choose from.

But she says there is very little interest among those doctors in taking on the responsibilities of a full-time doctor living in the area.

Ontario Ministry of Health renewed the program last fall

“What we’ve found is that locum physicians want to be locum physicians,” she says.  “They’re coming for a reason. They don’t want the commitment to a full time practice. Locuming gives them a good compensation model with no overhead and with maximum flexibility.” 

Fenlon says, in her experience, more newly-graduated physicians are also choosing to do locums to gain a breadth of experience and avoid the cost of setting up a permanent practice.

She says she’d rather see the ministry of health put money paid in premiums to locums into helping doctors set up shop.

Recruitment is also fizzling in the Matheson, Iroquois Falls and Cochrane area, according to the CEO of the MICs Health Care Group.

Paul Chatelain says he gets more doctors asking about the incentive to work in the ER than are interested in full-time opportunities.

“It’s one of those things once you have it, it’s hard to get rid of it right or hard to let go,” he says.”So we go to recruitment fairs looking to hire physicians or recruit physicians and the first thing they ask is, OK, well what’s your hourly rate to get paid for the ER department in your community?”

Chatelain says the premiums vary according to location but at one of his ER’s it amounts to an additional $75 dollars an hour.

Sometimes the cure becomes part of the problem-Dr. Maurianne Reade, Manitoulin Health Centre, Mindemoya

Dr. Maurianne Reade is a full-time physician at the Manitoulin Health Centre in Mindemoya.

She says she and her colleagues depend on locums to keep the ER open and it would be disastrous if the program were to end suddenly, but it doesn’t always seem fair.

“It is one of the challenges that if the full-time physicians are compensated at significantly less than what the locums are, it can become a disincentive for locums to choose to establish a rural practice,” she says.

“Sometimes the cure becomes part of the problem.”

A spokesperson for the ministry of health says the Ontario government will have more to say about the possible extension of the locum program in the near future.

The ministry says it continues to work with its partners, including the Ontario Medical Association, on a permanent solution to best support the sector beyond March 2024.