NL Health Services expects to see physicians on staff at the Family Care Clinic in Grand Falls-Windsor in the coming months.
The lack of doctors at the facility came to light again this week after the town council spoke out about the problem.
Recruitment of physicians for the new facility has proven challenging, not because physicians aren’t interested, but because they’re looking for greater flexibility.
That’s according to Senior Medical Director for the Central Zone, Dr. Des Whalen. He says they’ve been working with a number of doctors to address their needs and interests.
Dr. Whalen says people graduating from family medicine these days are looking for practices that are “robust and they can do a little bit of everything.” That includes community work, hospital work and emergency medicine.
“When we found out we had a group of physicians who were interested, we started to work with them to see what sort of model we could come up with, that was really going to suit them best.”
Whalen says they’ve been working toward that goal and they hope to have the physicians on board within the next few months.
“Over the past month to six weeks, we’ve had some engagement sessions with groups of physicians…and we’re really going through a process now of working out some of those logistics to be able to get this interested group of physicians on boarded to start doing some of this work in primary care.”