New family doctors are calling Kingston, Ont., home with the city’s doctor recruitment program looking to tackle an issue impacting thousands in the region.
As of March, this year, 30,000 Kingston residents had been looking to register with a family doctor. But concerns relating to doctor shortages aren’t specific to the Limestone City, as regions across the province — even the country — feel the brunt of the ongoing health-care issue. To deal with this, the City of Kingston employed a physician recruitment program in 2022.
Nine physicians were employed as part of the first round of recruitment. Recently, eight new physicians have joined the fray, bringing the total number of new doctor recruits to 17. About $3 million were allocated by the city to the program.
“We’re in a very unique position. Our Health Care Connect list is actually going down and that’s because we are rostering new patients,” said Craig Desjardins, the director of strategy, innovation, and partnerships with the City of Kingston.
The Health Care Connect program helps to connect people who don’t have a family health care provider with physicians and nurses who are accepting new patients in their area. Those who are part of the program are put onto a wait-list as they await referral to a doctor.
According to Desjardins, the new doctor recruits have been able to care for about 15,000 patients.
One of these doctors, Ani Garg, said he’s settling into his role in the city — a role he equates to as a dream job. Garg, a family physician at the Kingston Community Health Centres, was one of the first doctors recruited as part of the city’s program.
“I started working here part time… in September. Then I signed on for full-time status in November,” he said, adding that he has 1,200 patients rostered with him but continues to advise people to use the provincial Health Care Connect service to get connected to the doctors they need.
He himself is looking to care for more patients as well.
“Medicine is one of those things that is quite unique in this world. We can literally save lives, we can change (their) life trajectory,” Garg said. “That is an incredible responsibility. It’s also an incredible responsibility (and) incredibly rewarding. I’m very lucky to work in this field.”
With the city working on ways to lessen the load of a healthcare crisis in the making, there’s a sentiment that the city is trying to manage an issue that should be tackled instead by the province.
“I’ve been very clear over the last couple of years. This is an area of provincial jurisdiction. It really is, I think, fundamentally up to the province to be able to invest and fix the challenges that we are seeing,” said mayor Bryan Paterson, noting that the city has had to redirect municipal tax dollars away from city services in order to operate the recruitment program.
“I do believe that as much as we need to respond as a municipality, just given how critical this issue it is ultimately up to the province to address this issue.”