Saskatchewan's efforts to recruit and retain as many of its medical school and residency graduates as possible appear to be paying off. In 1998, 86% of University of Saskatchewan family practice residency graduates stayed in the province. In recent years, comparable figures have drooped as low as 50%.
The recruitment efforts begin in medical school with the Adopt-a-Student Program that links first-year students with 32 health districts throughout the province. Participants in the 3-year-old program spend 2 weeks each spring in a health district, sampling the variety offered by rural practice.
Dale Schmeichel, CEO of the South Country Health District south of Moose Jaw, says this is a "very rural" area with 12 000 residents scattered throughout ranching and farming country and small villages. He says that students travel with local FPs to satellite clinics in small villages, go out with public health nurses and soak up the cultural life. Four of the 6 family physicians in Assiniboine, the region's largest town, practise obstetrics, so the students gain experience in that specialty too. "We show them the rural advantage - lower overheads, and as a family practitioner you get to do more things." Students, he says, "literally babble about the range of things that family practitioners in a rural setting do."
With the first-year medical students already experienced in rural practice, he says, "roll the clock ahead 6 years, and [think] how much easier it's going to be to do a selling job on those residents when three-quarters of them have actually been out here through the Adopt-a-Student Program and had ongoing contact with us."