Incentives attract visiting doctors to northern Ontario ER's, but they're not sticking around

It's a program that has successfully kept emergency rooms operating in northern Ontario through COVID, but some say the Temporary Locum Program may be working against recruiting efforts that would provide a lasting fix to the doctor shortage.

During COVID, the provincial government started paying premiums to traveling doctors in northern Ontario.

The goal of the program, which has been renewed several times, was to keep hospital emergency rooms staffed through the pandemic when there was a lack of existing family physicians.

The program, last renewed last fall, is set to expire once again at the end of the March. 

Doctors and administrators across the north say they still depend on locums to keep emergency rooms open.

But they also say the premium paid to visiting doctors works against them in recruiting full-time doctors to their communities. 

Ann Fenlon is the medical recruitment and retention coordinator in north Algoma, which includes the Lady Dunn Health Centre in Wawa. 

She says they have three physicians, where the province says there should be seven.

Fenlon says at first, she thought the temporary locum program would help recruit doctors, but it hasn't turned out that way.

She says she doesn't have any trouble scheduling locums, with a pool of about 40 to choose from.

But she says there is very little interest among those doctors in taking on the responsibilities of a full-time doctor living in the area.

"What we've found is that locum physicians want to be locum physicians," she says.  "They're coming for a reason. They don't want the commitment to a full time practice. Locuming gives them a good compensation model with no overhead and with maximum flexibility." 

Fenlon says, in her experience, more newly-graduated physicians are also choosing to do locums to gain a breadth of experience and avoid the cost of setting up a permanent practice.

She says she'd rather see the ministry of health put money paid in premiums to locums into helping doctors set up shop.