With its latest success story working in the community, the Boissevain Health Care Recruitment Committee is looking to move forward into the future.

Taylor Robertson has begun her career at Turtle Mountain Physio, the latest student to receive sponsorship from the committee. In the community for a couple of decades now, the group can look back to playing a massive role in keeping local health care positions in the community filled, an important contribution.

Rob Adams and Ken Pringle have been a part of the committee from the beginning. Adams remembered getting the idea from a neighbouring community, and passing it on to then-Mayor Ed Anderson. In Boissevain, it started with a mandate to recruit physicians only, but later moved into other health care positions.

The main contribution of the committee is through education sponsorship. Normally, the candidate will take care of the first year of their schooling, and then the sponsorship will come into play for another year or two depending on the circumstance. The premise is a “return of service agreement”, which means the candidate would owe a year of service in a local health centre for each year of sponsorship. If things do not work out, they can pay the committee back. Mostly this has worked well for everyone involved. Adams added they also would help with relocation to Boissevain. Money for this comes from donations, including those from the Donor’s Choice campaign.

Nurses have been a big success story for the committee. Adams and Pringle began naming off people in the community they have helped in their nursing education, and most of them are still practicing in one of the health care centres in Boissevain. There have been occasional hiccups, but as Pringle said, when you looked at the number of shifts they have received over the years from these nurses, it has paid for itself over and over again.

“When we look at it,” Adams said, “we’ve helped a lot of people.”

They later moved on to sponsoring health care aides and other professionals in the field.

The newest addition is Taylor Robertson, a native of Boissevain. Merle Neufeld, owner of Turtle Mountain Physio, said the process started many years ago, when Robertson was in high school and observing at the clinic. They started talking and both realized by the time she was done school, Neufeld would be looking to slow down a little bit. She attended the University of Manitoba, and the Health Recruitment Committee helped her with $5,000 a year for two years during her Masters’ program. A member of the committee for about 10 years, he was willing to step away from the group’s decision in regards to Robertson as it would benefit his operation. Neufeld said it worked out well as he is looking for somewhat of a succession plan.

“Absolutely,” Neufeld stated. “I’ve been clear with that. This is the first step moving to retirement. It will be a number of years yet, but I think the decision was I either end my career and this shuts down or we recruit someone and it lives on.”

He said a key was that Robertson comes from the community, which makes it more likely she would come back. The new physiotherapist has been in the clinic since September 3, is completing her process in a supervised environment and Neufeld said there has been a good response to her from the community.

Pringle said expanding the parameters of the positions the committee will recruit has really worked out well for them.

 “I think from a town standpoint, especially since we have expanded the spectrum of what we sponsor, there’s nobody living in the area that can say they’re not concerned about health care,” Pringle explained “Ultimately anything we can do to stabilize health care makes it harder to take portions of it away.”

Despite all the effort everyone puts in, not everything works. They did have a doctor in the pipeline, sponsored by the committee and others, who was attending university overseas. Everyone involved was happy with how events were unfolding, but it was impossible for the candidate to do his residency in Manitoba, so he ended up practicing overseas. There are challenges with nursing as they are often overworked with too many shifts, even though they cannot get full time positions. Agency nurses who travel from community to community can be helpful, but also expensive. It can be frustrating to see foreign-born health professionals having to change careers when it is too difficult to qualify in the province.

Currently, there are no students being sponsored by the recruitment committee, although there are possibilities being looked at. The facilities have a full complement of nurses for now, but one or two more would be helpful. They do need to look forward however, Pringle stated, and meet again to see what needs are.

“When this committee was created, we probably knew the challenges rural health care was facing,” Pringle said. “It’s like a car, as long as your car is running good, you don’t look at how your car is running. Our community needs to get more active again. Once the nurse situation got sorted out, and they weren’t coming to us and with Ed passing away, our committee has kind of gone to sleep a bit.”

He said they needed to look at nurses retiring, and think of the future. The committee needs to get together, reorganize, and talk to the people at the health centre to see what the needs are.

“We need to roll up our sleeves and make it the best hospital it can be.”

Neufeld agrees the committee needs to look over the horizon, particularly with changes to health care. Overall, they have done good work and can continue onward.

“I think it is quite worthwhile,” he said. “It creates that environment where we can help our health care. It is great to actually do it, to have people trained and come out the other end and work in the community.”

by PAUL RAYNER
Recorder staff