A former health minister says he can’t understand why the Nova Scotia Health Authority missed a major opportunity to recruit new physicians.
Nova Scotia was the only province or territory not represented at a rural doctors event in St. John’s.
PC MLA Chris d’Entremont says even though Premier Stephen McNeil said it was completely unacceptable, the blame is with government.
“I saw the premier’s face that he didn’t expect that the health authority would have ignored such an important job fair. There’s a number of Nova Scotians that are taking their med school in Newfoundland. Newfoundland is one province away. It shouldn’t have been too difficult for the health authority to have been organized to have been there. But this is what we’ve been saying, the challenge of having a health authority that’s responsible for everything. It takes a lot of responsibility away from the (health) minister and the government. They don’t know what’s actually going on. It’s time the government brings a lot of those issues, those services, back in-house so they can have a better handle on it.”
More than 600 physicians and medical students attended the training session this past weekend.
It also featured a recruiting fair.
A spokesperson for the Nova Scotia Health Authority says they always look at where best to place their physician recruitment resources.
Grayson Fulmer, senior director of medical affairs, says previous returns from events like the one in St. John’s didn’t yield much.
He says the health authority always reassesses its recruitment strategy.
Fulmer says they are well aware of all the controversy.
“When we set our strategy this year for physician recruitment, we looked at a number of events. We looked at previous returns from this particular event and decided it wasn’t really where we wanted to put our resources at that particular time. We chose to reinvest our resources in similar sorts of areas to cover off similar sorts of practitioners. We were actually in Newfoundland the week before, our recruitment team.”
Fulmer says part of the planning is always reassessing to determine the best places to send our recruiters.
“Given the feedback, I think it would certainly cause us to rethink and look at where and what conferences we’re attending.”
