RED LAKE – Officials with the newly minted NOSM University say their plans to expand enrolment and branch out to more communities could be a possible solution to staffing shortages in Red Lake and other communities.
It has been two weeks since Red Lake’s Margaret Cochenour Memorial Hospital was forced to close its emergency department for a 24-hour period due to lack of physicians, and a week since NOSM University became an official entity.
At a glance, the two might be very loosely connected, but in reality one is a possible solution for the other.
On March 27, residents of Red Lake needing emergency care were forced to travel just over two hours to the Dryden Regional Health Centre for treatment and while it was only temporary, the aftermath of the closure has had many speaking out about the lack of resources in the North.
Officials with the newly created NOSM University believe a locally sourced solution will work.
Marathon's doctor Sarah Newbery says a contributing factor to the situation has been the increased challenges to bring locums to the region.
“Pandemic travel restrictions, as one example, have limited the ability of locums to travel to northern Ontario,” Newbery says. “We have seen healthcare provider burnout, we know that it is harder to get both physicians and nurses in Northern Ontario now.”
However, with it being the only dedicated medical school in all of Canada, Newbery says there will be a need to think of NOSM in both a provincial and a national context.
NOSM University's dean Dr. Sarita Verma says Red Lake is not an unusual situation, nor is it alone.
“It happened very urgently and it’s extremely sad, but it’s actually not uncommonly for us to hear, for me, to hear almost on a weekly or monthly basis from a community that’s in crisis.”
Verma says she is appreciative of the support from 40 municipalities across the province, which reached out to the provincial government, petitioning for an expanded number of seats for students at the university.
Newbery agrees, but notes NOSM University shouldn't be the only place hospitals in the region recruit from.
"Northern Ontario currently needs all the physicians that it can get from where ever they have trained as well, and I think that’s really the focus of communities that we are hearing from across the north that they need physicians, they need great physicians whether those physicians have trained at NOSM or elsewhere."
