By Angela Hill

Medical program aims to alleviate rural doctor shortage

Feb 28, 2011 | 5:09 AM

The Victoria Hospital hallways now have medical students among the rest of the staff.

They are training in Prince Albert as part of Phase D of medical school, the last 18 months of their medical education before residency.

“The idea behind this is to start distributing medical education away from the larger sites of Saskatoon and Regina and into smaller centres,” said Dr. Tom Smith-Windsor, the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Medicine’s associate dean of rural and northern medical education, based in Prince Albert.

“The main reason for that is that studies show that medical students are more likely to return to an area where they have trained and the earlier they can get exposure to an area and the longer they stay there, the more likely they are to come back.”

There are four positions in the program.

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Magda Lenartowicz is one of those students. She is currently in her block of training in the Emergency Department of Victoria Hospital.

“I wanted something in a smaller centre, actually I wanted to have closer contact with the physicians,” said Lenartowicz about the good training opportunity the program presents.

“I felt Prince Albert would be the perfect place to work with the physicians directly and the residents directly, one-on-one.

“I’m from Toronto, so for me it’s a culture shock, but I think the education is amazing. If I didn’t actually come here and live here and do it here, I would have never known and I would have discarded this. So I think it’s important for students to have the opportunity to experience this.”

Currently the four students in Prince Albert follow the same program as their classmates in Regina and Saskatoon.

“Ever Tuesday morning we have academic day … we get that via telehealth from Saskatoon,” Lenartowicz said.

“We can participate in any medical education that everyone in Saskatoon can because of telehealth.

So I don’t feel like it’s any different because we still have the same components.”

The programs won’t always be identical, Smith-Windsor said.

Instead of their clerkships being in a block rotation, where they do all of their training in one area before moving on, the plan is to have the students do training in different areas on different days.

“It more closely resembles the practice that they would develop after they graduate,” he said.

“Prince Albert is just the first of what we hope will be several regional centres to provide clinical clerkships.”

ahill@panow.com