GUYSBOROUGH – With spring comes new life, new vitality and, for Guysborough Memorial Hospital (GMH), new doctors.
The Guysborough Memorial Hospital Foundation has been working for years to recruit doctors to GMH but, with a global shortage of doctors, the process has taken longer than anyone expected or wanted. Last week, recruitment efforts bore fruit with two new doctors arriving at GMH.
Dr. Olawumi Adaramodu, who goes by Dr. Wumi, is one of three doctors the foundation has actively recruited over the past year.
Bill Innis, chair of the foundation, told The Journal last week that she can “cover the emergency room and everything else; the office, the inpatients, the nursing home.”
The second doctor to arrive last week, Dr. Onyi-Ibarakumo Isiramen, who goes by the name Dr. IB, is a Nova Scotia Practice Ready Assessment Program (NSPRAP) physician recruited by Nova Scotia Health (NSH). The NSPRAP website states that the program ensures “that international medical graduates (IMGs) who wish to practice family medicine in Nova Scotia possess appropriate clinical skills and knowledge to provide quality patient care.”
Innis said Dr. Isiramen can fulfill most physician duties, except for emergency room coverage. After successful completion of the NSPRAP process, Dr. Isiramen will be eligible to do so.
“We’re very pleased to have two physicians here in the community to help ease the load, in terms of having primary care physician services available to us, and for one of them to help in the rotation of call for the emergency room,” said Innis.
He added, “We still are going to experience closures in the emergency room for a while because there’s only one of the new doctors who can do it, and she will not be doing it every second night … We have to provide a balanced lifestyle for these people, and they can’t be on call every second night, or they won’t stay if we do that.”
Residents who wish to be added to the new doctors’ services must register through the Need a Family Practice registry at https://needafamilypractice.nshealth.ca.
In the most recent NSH report on the need for family physicians (Feb. 1, 2022), 86,050 Nova Scotians are on the Need a Family Practice Registry, representing 8.6 per cent of the population in the province, compared to 55,859 one year earlier.
Last January, 2,162 people found a family practice, while 5,733 people added their names to the registry.
According to the report, as of February, 139 people on the family practice registry in the Guysborough and Canso area have not yet been placed.
Finding a Primary Care Provider reports are available through NSH’s Reports, Statistics and Accountability webpage.
