Newfoundland Labrador health area authority cancels signing incentive for Gander

Canada wide there is a problem of attracting doctors away from cities to more remote areas. In our area of the prairies and in rural Saskatchewan doctors are often from foreign countries. Our local doctors are from South Africa originally.
A compromise in the Newfoundland area might be to increase the signing bonus but throughout the area and only to the amount the area can afford. This would not discriminate against rural areas to favor Gander. Doctors for the most part like to migrate to larger urban areas. I can see this for specialists but it seems to me that there are a lot of pluses to having a rural practice as far as lifestyle is concerned for general practitioners. Of course I am not a medical doctor!


Central Health cancels extra money for new docs
Last Updated: Tuesday, July 8, 2008 6:42 AM ET
CBC News
The health authority responsible for Central Newfoundland will not continue a two-year pilot project that gave new doctors an extra $10,000 if they signed up for a job in Gander.
Graduating medical students who accept work in Central Newfoundland get a signing bonus of $20,000. Since 2007, new doctors who took jobs in Gander, which has long had a doctor shortage, received an extra $10,000.
The deal, put in place by Central Health, was supposed to last until January 2009; instead it will end immediately.
Bob Woolfrey, chair of the Central Health Board, told CBC News giving the extra bonus to doctors to work in Gander made it harder to recruit doctors to work in smaller towns in Central.
"We started getting complaints from the rest of the region that it was more of a disincentive than an incentive," Woolfrey said. "So we decided we would, on that basis, discontinue that practice."
Larry Dawson, manager of the Gander Medical Clinic, said he thinks Central Health will make the recruiting of doctors more difficult by eliminating the extra bonus.
"We're still severely short physicians in the community," Dawson said. "We're right on the edge here right now. If we don't get a couple of physicians within the next year or two we're going to have another 5,000 people with no family physicians."
The Gander medical clinic recently accepted 4,000 names of people who want to become a patient of two new doctors. There were only 2,000 spaces, so the clinic held a lottery Monday, to decide who would get an appointment with one of the doctors.
Dawson said instead of ending the pilot project early, Central Health should have extended it.
However, offering a $30,000 signing bonus to every new doctor in the region is something Woolfrey said the health board can not afford.