Northern Ontario med school residents remain in region, promising study suggests

Dr. Elizabeth Wenghofer (PhD) says it's still too early to tell if the Northern Ontario School of Medicine's strategy of favouring students from the vast region is translating into their staying after to practise after graduation. But her ongoing study on the whereabouts of the graduates of the 10-year-old school's first two cohorts certainly appears promising."The preliminary numbers look good," said Dr. Wenghofer, an associate professor and director of the School of Rural and Northern Health at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., in an interview with the Medical Post.Under the auspices of a provincially funded program, Wenghofer compared the practice locations of 67 students from NOSM's first two graduating classes—2009 and 2010—with the practice locations of 468 medical students from other Canadian schools from the same period.The results suggested the vast majority of NOSM grads—89%—who did both undergraduate and post-graduate at the school were practising in the area.An anonymous map of their locations published by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons shows that roughly two-thirds (64%) were practising in the region's three largest urban centres: Sudbury, Thunder Bay, and Timmins. Roughly one-quarter were working in rural communities across Northern Ontario.According to Wenghofer, 70% of students who did their undergraduate training at other schools, but did their post-graduate training at NOSM, also stayed in the region.By contrast, less than 5% of non-NOSM students who did not study at NOSM were working in the north.A joint initiative of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and Laurentian University, NOSM started training physicians, registered dietitians, physician assistants, and other health professionals in 2005. More than 90% of the school's graduates from the MD program are from Northern Ontario, while the rest come from rural and remote regions across Canada.Dr. Wenghofer said she is not surprised that so many newly minted physicians who hail from Northern Ontario are staying in the region after they graduate."The main reason is likely that this is home for them," she said. "They are comfortable here and have the social and family support they need to be connected."That might not be true for people from other communities with different cultures (or) church."The preliminary results of her study, she added, are in keeping with the findings of other studies in Scandinavia and Australia, where medical schools in isolated regions have long given priority to students from those areas."NOSM is not the first to do this," said Dr. Wenghofer.She added that her study will now focus on details such as the rate at which graduates return to their home towns, where locally-grown-and-trained specialists are locating, and how long doctors who set up practice actually remain in the region."We're definitely be looking at all these things more closely," said Dr. Wenghofer.The goal, she added, is to verify and gauge the success of the NSMO approach to dealing with physician shortages in the region by giving priority to homegrown medical students."A lot of ministry of health and taxpayer money is being spent on these systems," said Dr. Wenghofer. "We want to make sure we're spending it in the right places."

Northern Ontario med school residents remain in region, promising study suggests

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