Drs Mark Lambiotte and Shane Longman appeared before City Council yesterday warning of an impending staffing emergency at West Coast General Hospital.
They asked the city to help form a task group to develop strategies to attract and retain doctors and nurses.
Mayor Sharie Minions said there was a similar effort many years ago, but the city will take a different approach this time.
“When this has been done in the past, it has been ‘what can the city do to attract medical professionals from a financial standpoint’, and that’s not the role of a municipality – that is the role of the provincial government, Island Health, and other stakeholders,” she said. “This has broadening out to looking at how we promotoe our community, what assets do we need, what infrastructure do we need to work on and what do we need to do about the reputation of our community to effectivly attract medical professionals, and that is well within the role and responsibility of the city.”
Minions said one of the biggest challenges is trying to shed the ‘worst place to live’ moniker which haunts us online when people search ‘Port Alberni’.
Five family doctors will be retiring over the next five years, and with thousands of people already without their own doctor locally, the problem will get much worse unless more doctors and nurses are hired.
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