No Quick Cure for Health Care on Gabriola Island

The President of the Gabriola Health Care Foundation says the doctor shortage in Canada, including on Gabriola Island, isn’t going to be fixed anytime soon.

“We're not going to see a huge influx of doctors to the system,” Jeff Malmgren tells Life on Gabriola TV’s Frank Moher, in this latest episode of our series on health care in the central Vancouver Island area.

“If you look around BC, if you look around Canada, if you look around the world, there aren't enough family doctors,” Malmgren says. “And, in fact, in BC there are more and more doctors who are moving out of family practice.

“So we can't change that. But what we can do is try to set up a system here that will support our whole person and our whole community, and I think that's the direction that we're moving.”

Malmgren assumed the President’s position in January. The Foundation supports the Gabriola Community Health Centre, a locally-funded facility opened in 2012.

Malmgren notes that Gabriola lost two doctors in recent years, “not because they didn't like working here, but because they had other family issues that they needed to address. And it became harder and harder to replace doctors, so when we lose two doctors there's a significant impact.

“You lose two doctors in Vancouver, well, nobody really notices. In Gabriola, what we're talking about is half of the doctors.”

Malmgren discusses the Foundation’s “Be Our Doctor” campaign, aimed at attracting new physicians to the island. It has had its successes, including recently drawing three new Family Medicine Residents to the island, who will continue their post-medical school training in a hands-on placement at the clinic.

However, he notes the ethical trickiness that sometimes goes with recruiting new doctors. “We start to say, well, we could get doctors from South Africa or another country . . . but there's also a sort of a social responsibility. Taking doctors from a place where they may not be as well off, and bringing them here, creates a bigger problem in those in those countries.”

He also discusses an incident where a front-line worker at the facility was bullied by a member of the public, the stress that health care workers are under generally, and the recent funding of a new Health and Wellbeing Service Coordinator position on Gabriola, to support the already-established Gabriola Health and Wellness Collaborative, of which the Foundation is a member.

Malmgren says the funding presents an opportunity to build a new system of health care on the island. “All the not-for-profits on this island and almost everywhere else are working with a a deficit of resources. And sometimes we all try to take on all of the roles. Is there an opportunity to say, 'What if you took on this role so that I could take on that role? What if we could look at this in a different way?'

“The Collaborative has a really good opportunity to start to really formalize and begin to take some stronger action toward a more collaborative community," he notes.

Meantime, the Gabriola Health Care Foundation’s “Be Our Doctor” campaign continues, with details at beourdoctor.ca.