A Doctor For Everyone
A Healthy Port Hawkesbury Starts with Improved Access to Health Care!
While campaigning, I have heard that Health Care is on the minds of many citizens. Families, seniors, students and young professionals still find themselves without a family doctor. Our hospitals continue to face temporarily closures. We have medical health care professionals nearing retirement and we absolutely need a succession plan for them.
Health care recruitment is not the primary responsibility of municipalities; however, the Town of Port Hawkesbury is making it a priority!
The Town of Port Hawkesbury joined forces with Richmond County and many stakeholders in both the health care field and in the community. We are called “Cape Breton South Recruiting for Health.” We have hired a health care navigator, Maggie MacDonald, to work towards the goals set by our team.
One of those extremely important goals is ensuring that site visits with doctors, medical students, and medical health professionals are successful. This takes careful and diligent planning and coordination with all involved.
As seen in this photo, on March 2nd of this year, we hosted several visiting doctors who were very impressed with our Town. Covid has delayed the results of that visit. We will continue to pursue their interest in our Town.
We have another possible site visit for November. Why are site visits so important?
We want to leave an amazing impression. We want them to tour our community and all of its amazing assets. We have a collaborative health care centre, schools (including French Immersion Program), trails, waterfront, gym, park,recreation, artisan hub and more. We want them to envision our community as a place to call home. We want them to feel welcomed.
The other important aspect of what Cape Breton South Recruiting for Health can do is to work directly with our health care professionals on retention. This is a direction our group will be exploring as well.
Another important step is that we need to stay in touch with our youth who are pursuing medical health careers. We want to ensure that they have opportunities to return home to practice.
At the SAERC graduation this year at the Allan J MacEachen Airport - I was standing 6 feet away from Margie Pace (who knew EVERY ONE of these young men and women). I asked her, “how can we stay connected to these amazing young people because our community will need them when they complete their studies!?” Margie agreed, “we absolutely do!” (I think we need to recruit Margie for Cape Breton South Recruiting for Health to help us!)
I make these points because health care recruitment and retention is no simple task. If the goal we seek is full and accessible health care for all of our citizens, then we must acknowledge that there will be divergent and multiple paths to get there and we must be ready to “think outside the box” and get creative!
We need to be thinking about today, tomorrow and 10 and 20 years down the road.
The most important thing we have accomplished with the Cape Breton South Recruiting for Health Team is that we have made a commitment to become directly involved in - and not sit by and depend on others to do this important work. We are rolling up our sleeves, taking our health care future seriously and doing this important work to improve the overall access to healthcare in Port Hawkesbury and Richmond County.
Thank you to Trevor Boudreau and Juanita Mombourquette who are co-chairs of Cape Breton South Recruiting For Health and all of the active members of the committee.
Please like and share if you agree that our Town MUST continue to make this a priority.