No more waiting for the government to get around to it: Society of Rural Physicians developing its own rural workforce strategy

As rural communities continue to struggle with the recruitment and retention of physicians, the Society of Rural Physicians of Canada (SRPC) has announced it will be developing a its own national rural health workforce strategy—rather than continuing to wait on the government to develop one.The move to develop this strategy was approved by society members at its annual general meeting last week, held in conjunction with its Rural and Remote Medicine Conference in Winnipeg. “I think what we’ve experienced in 32 years is that there's a lot of decisions being made that affect rural healthcare and it's often done to us and not with us,” SRPC president Dr. Gavin Parker, a family physician from Pincher Creek, Alta., told the Medical Post in on the sidelines of the conference.Since February, the SRPC had been calling on the federal government to develop such a strategy. However, the group’s health human resources advocacy committee recommended at the meeting that the SRPC take it upon itself to develop the strategy rather than wait.“We know that there's this healthcare crisis, and it's amplified in rural communities, and so I don't think we have the time to wait for someone else to do this work,” SRPC past president Dr. Sarah Lespérance, a rural generalist from Amherst, N.S. and a co-chair of the committee, told the Medical Post in Winnipeg.“That's why we've sort of shifted our language to say, ‘We want to lead this. This needs to happen. We want to seek the funding to make sure this comes to fruition.’”As stated in the committee’s recommendations, the strategy will focus on rural-specific education and training, licensing, recruitment and retention. The SRPC says this process will also involve partnerships with groups like the Canadian Institute of Health Information, federal agencies, local and Indigenous leaders and healthcare organizations.“We know there's people that have already done some of this work, maybe on a smaller scale, and so we're able to amplify that pretty quickly,” Dr. Lespérance said.This also includes looking at ways on how Canada can establish a pan-Canadian licensure to enhance physician mobility across the country. “It does get complicated, but certainly in a country that has one organization that accredits all the medical schools and two organizations that don't compete with each other that accredit all the residency programs, it seems to me that we can figure out licensure on a on some kind of national level,” Dr. Parker said.Although the SRPC is taking the first steps to develop this national strategy, the group says they would still welcome more federal leadership on this issue, such as appointing a national rural health commissioner, similar to what Australia has done.“Moving forward, this work doesn't always need to live with us, but someone does need to be the nucleus and get it started,” said Dr. Parker.

No more waiting for the government to get around to it: Society of Rural Physicians developing its own rural workforce strategy

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