Wanna Retain Doctors? Head to the High Schools
The recruitment and retention debate often focuses on MDs, but wouldn't we be aided by a strategy that involves exposing our youth to the profession much earlier on?
During an introductory biology course in the second year of my CBU undergraduate science degree a conversational around career unfolded.
At the time, I was a bit confused about my own plans. I was 20 years old and had ventured into an engineering degree for part of my undergrad and flirted seriously with a career in law. Medicine, a childhood aspiration, was quietly playing in the background as an option the entire time.
The more I was exposed to engineering and law, the more I knew these jobs were not sustainable career options given my personality and interests. The opposite was the case as it related to medicine.
As the conversation in that lecture hall continued, the professor said something profound that sticks with me still. Asked about a career in medicine, he said something like “Every year, 30% of the incoming science undergraduates say they are pursing a career in medicine, but the reality is that we admit one student to medical school every year”.
I don’t believe the professor had intended to deflate the tires of the medical student wannabes sitting before him, but that is in effect what he did.
It would be a year and a half before I had solidified my own intentions to pursue a career caring for patients. I’m lucky to some degree in that even then I was quite stubborn and didn’t place much weight on the professor’s words or what it might have meant for my chances.
We live in a time where physician shortages and physician burnout are perpetually in the news. COViD has only inflamed these issues but they’ve been ongoing for a while.
We also live in a world and a province where retention of medical doctors is becoming more and more difficult. The east coast has its charms but so do other areas of the country. How then is Nova Scotia positioning itself with respect to retention of physicians? How wise is our strategy? The Houston government is moving in interesting ways to solve part of the problem, but the strategy is by all accounts, incomplete.
One suggestion may be to tackle the issue from a grassroots perspective.
Innovative programs like the Women in Science Events (WISE) held at Cape Breton University may serve as a useful case study. The program aims to introduce high school students to science and what academic science in a university looks like. It also no doubt allows students to connect to mentors and envision a career path for themselves.
Similarly minded programs exist in relation to medical school but are siloed for the most part in undergraduate degree programs. In most of these cases, its the keen medical student wannabes that run and organize events.
Why not collaborate with high schools directly with respect to recruitment? A few ideas include a more robust reach out on the part of medical schools to local high schools, not just for information sessions but for immersion into what a career in medicine looks like and feels like.
There are lots of opportunities here. Observerships for talented high school students in operating rooms, emergency departments, and psychiatric clinics may go a long way in planting a seed in their minds. Many of our most talented high school students are rightly scanning the landscape and many view other health care opportunities as more attractive given the incredibly long road to life as a consultant physician in medicine.
An immersion program for all senior high school students in Nova Scotia into the medical field may in fact go a long way in creating interest in the profession. It would no doubt give keen students thinking about engineering, and philosophy, and dentistry, the opportunity to take a second look at medicine as an option.
Prior to my own entry to Dalhousie, I volunteered a lot but the closest I got to medicine was a door greeter gig at the local emergency department. While an important and formative experience, I was cast aside from the medicine machine for the most part. For too many students, even those fixated on a career in medicine, getting a sense of what the job looks like is next to impossible unless mom or dad is a physician.
This is a problem, and the fix may just lend itself to the retention issues we are feeling so strongly now. Renumeration for physicians needs to be part of the strategy but why don’t we also make investments even earlier on?
Instead of continuing a storyline that makes a career in medicine seem so unachievable, why don’t we make it seem possible and appealing to our youth.
It is my personal belief that the most difficult part of being accepted to medical school is often not a matter of grades or volunteering endeavors but instead amounts to a battle of endurance.
When it comes to endurance and creating the will to persist through all the studying and volunteering, exposure to the magic of medicine early on may go a long way to making the aspirations of young people in our communities more concrete.
We can move the needle if we wish to do so. Innovative and out of the box thinking is how we will make the small steps accumulate to great leaps.