In brief

Frank Peters says he has been receiving two to three requests a day for information about practice opportunities. "That doesn't mean we're going to recruit all of these [doctors]," he says. "But even if we only recruit 25%, I think we'll have been quite successful."

Peters, a former drug-company sales representative and continuing medical education coordinator, hung his shingle at the Medical Society of Nova Scotia (MSNS) in September 1995. He believes he's the first recruiter in Canada to be cohired by a medical society and a provincial government.

As in other provinces, the shortage of rural physicians here became acute a few years ago when a growing number of doctors, disgruntled over fee and service cuts, started to leave for greener pastures. One of the latest to leave is Dr. Rob Kimball, immediate past president of the MSNS, who moved to North Carolina.

"Rural physicians were . . . overworked with long hours and no backup, and often no specialist backup," says Halifax neurologist LeRoy Heffernan, another MSNS past president. "The remuneration wasn't good, they couldn't get away for CME, they couldn't get away for vacation. . . .

"We thought if we could make [rural practice] attractive -- if we could recruit and help people in rural communities by lessening their workload -- we would get new people and the people who were sitting on the fence about wanting to go would change their mind and stay."

Although the departure of specialists is also cause for concern -- Heffernan himself is leaving for Saudi Arabia -- Peters' present mandate is to find family physicians for Nova Scotia's underserviced areas and to help set up and coordinate a rural locum service.

He says the province still needs about 35 general practitioners, depending on "the given day." Seven incentive and 13 nonincentive positions have already been filled, with about five of the physicians recruited directly by Nova Scotia communities. Most of the jobs have been taken by Canadian graduates, although some have been filled by doctors from Commonwealth countries who were already practising in Canada.

Physicians who fill the incentive positions qualify for the province's incentive package, which provides a minimum annual salary of $138 000, a $50 000 bonus, moving expenses and other assistance.

Peters plans to focus more of his efforts on recruiting residents -- he says he came on board too late to have much impact on this year's graduating crop -- and if necessary he will look for graduates outside Nova Scotia. He has already travelled to Newfoundland and found "a lot of interest" among residents at Memorial University.

Peters, who spends much of his time on the road visiting underserviced areas, intends to build a database of community profiles. He's already expanded his recruiting search to the Internet. However, he knows that marketing is only part of the equation. "Recruitment is one thing, but retention is the next big step for all of us in Canada," he says. He thinks the Atlantic provinces will eventually band together to tackle the region's physician shortages.

For now, he hopes the locum service and education efforts to help reduce unnecessary patient demand will help address retention problems. "This position is new, it's different," he says. "If we all work together and if we work in tandem we can solve it, but it's not going to be solved overnight."