Loss of Logan Lake doctor highlights rural recruitment issue
TUESDAY MORNING EDITORIAL — More than 200 frustrated people showed up at the Logan Lake Fire Hall on Monday to voice their frustration over the loss of their doctor.
As of Friday, the community will be served by a nurse practitioner in the town’s clinic, who can issue prescriptions and order tests, but residents made it clear they want and need a doctor.
Residents listen at meeting Monday. (Screenshot, CFJC video)
The Interior Health Authority has been trying for four months to replace Dr. Uzair Sheik, who is returning to Africa with his family. That means residents will have to drive to Kamloops to access a family doctor.
As IHA officials explained to residents, getting doctors for rural communities is hard, and keeping them is just as difficult.
Rural health care is an ongoing challenge for government and health practitioners alike. Incentives are offered based on location, locums relieve rural doctors, and isolation funding is available for doctors in eligible communities.
In December, Health Minister Terry Lake announced that nine new doctors had been hired for rural B.C. communities under a joint initiative with the B.C. Medical Association.
The Rural Physicians for B.C. incentive provides recruited doctors with a one-time payment of $100,000 when they commit to three years in a designated community. Seventeen communities were designated under the program, which was launched almost a year ago.
One of the new doctors, Dr. Steven Broadbent, went to Clearwater from the U.K, saying, “The financial incentive and guaranteed income made the transition and worry a lot easier, as it is a big jump.”
Clearly, a $100,000 cheque is a help but isn’t getting the job done for all communities in need. A report by the Canadian Institute of Health Information last year showed there’s been little recent increase in the number of rural doctors despite the best efforts of the province.
Logan Lake will, unfortunately, have to get in line for a replacement while the provincial Liberals figure out how to ramp up their recruitment drive again.
ArmchairMayor.ca 
Dear Dr. Terry Lake
Recently I met Dr. Steve Broadbent on a river raft trip in Clearwater BC and he told me about the problem that rural areas face with the lack of Doctors.
I have already written you about this technology that I have during the Ebola crisis in Africa. This is not a treatment for a single condition just as chemicals are not a treatment for a solitary disease because they can be used to formulate a host of drugs to treat a wide variety of conditions so too this technology can be used to treat many conditions from the simplest to the most obscure. Why is this the case?
There are 24 elements associated with natural pathways that can be ionized with copper and aluminium.
The ionization process can be illustrated as if we “pave” the roadway and the chemistry of the body relies on these so to speak “roadways” but without our technique the roadway is ruff and sometime even blocked. Our technology paves the road so to speak. This process alone has positive results and the current methods using medication is great and necessary however we can speed up that method by “paving” the roadway.
So we would like to combine this technology with current methods. Both methods have there limitations and equally positive results but together all is possible in terms of real cures, in other words we are suggesting that medical science should be open to using a new tool to speed up the healing process, furthermore this cannot be viewed as an alternative because the theory is based on how the body is engineered.
Additionally with this new technology chemical side affects can be controlled such as chemo-therapy and brand new medicine can easily be developed by means of the knowledge of how these 24 elements work in conjunction with brain to organ communications. Furthermore there is a tool we use for diagnostic purposes that can contribute to current diagnostic tools to further guarantee positive results and this can be taught and then used by nurses, RN’s and CRN’s making rural communities more self sufficient allowing Doctors to Care for things remotely or as itinerant Doctors.
I could go on describing but it’s best to do clinical trials to prove its worth.
LikeLike