It’s not secret that there has been a shortage of people lining up to work in the health care system in the north.
From no dentist to not enough nurses to no mental health workers to having to travel to Dawson Creek for blood tests to having to divert patients to Chetwynd or Dawson Creek because there is no doctor on for the weekend, we here in Tumbler Ridge face this issue day to day.
And it was this lack of health care workers that inspired Dr Sean Maurice to found the Healthcare Travelling roadshow.
“We try to do three things,” says Maurice. “First, we try to inspire rural, high school students to consider careers in health care. That’s what you see at the schools. And we do that with a ‘near peer’ teaching approach, bringing healthcare students who are still in training to come and talk to the high school students. We bring a diverse group of healthcare students from different backgrounds, different schools across the province and different careers—not just medicine and nursing but dietetics and kinesiology and lab tech and midwifery and occupational therapy, pharmacy, etc.—to try and portray that there’s a lot of different things you can do in healthcare. It’s not just medicine and nursing. Our goal is to try and inspire the rural youth to consider healthcare.”
Second, he says, the roadshow allows the healthcare students to experience what rural communities in the north are like. “Some of the students are training in the north, though not all. And even if they’re born and raised in Prince George, they don’t necessarily know what Tumbler Ridge is like. So we try to give them an experience of the community. They see the high school, they see the hospital, they do something fun in town. So in Tumbler, they’re going to see the Dinosaur Discovery Gallery and have a Geopark tour and they’re going to have dinner at the Steakhouse. When we can, we get mayor and council involved. That can be fun for the students, to learn about local politics and discover how, if you were a health professional in town, you’d actually be able to talk to somebody involved in government if you had any concerns, which is not something you get if you’re training in Vancouver.”
Finally, he says, the goal of the roadshow is to help break down the walls between different areas of health care. “Not only so that the high school students get to appreciate the diversity of careers possible in healthcare, but also so that our healthcare students get time to see other careers while they’re still in training. That might seem like an obvious thing to do, but it’s actually something we don’t do very well in healthcare. We all have our curricula in silos. And students are busy. It’s important to try and find opportunities for the students in training, to work together across disciplines and to learn what others are learning in their different disciplines. So when they’re professionals working together, they already know some of that. It’s harder to ask those questions once you’re in a professional capacity than it is when you’re a student.”
Is it working? Maurice says it is hard to tell. “We don’t have great data on the people who have actually gone into training and come back to communities, because it’s so hard to measure. There’s such a large number of students going into these careers every year. A huge win for a community like Tumbler Ridge would be one person coming in.”
That said, there are stories of students who have gone into healthcare because of the roadshow. “I have one student who grew up in a small town in the north who, in high school didn’t know what they wanted to do. They saw the roadshow, and they decided to do lab tech. As a lab tech student, came on the roadshow for several years, and then went back to their home community, where they still work. We have some of those stories and I’m hearing that more and more as the roadshow has grown.”
And it has grown. A decade ago they would go to only a few towns. Now they do a couple of trips all across the north, and there’s sister programs in Kelowna and Victoria.
He says that’s one way to measure how successful the program is. But more importantly, he says, is to see how the conversation has changed. “If you have a student, pay attention to how it has changed the conversation at the dinner table, conversations with friends or with counselors at school in the month following this. For the rest of this school year and into the fall: are students asking more questions about healthcare careers, and if they are, I think that’s actually the biggest measure of success because we don’t try to measure those outcomes.”
Why not? “Because we’re not a recruiting initiative. We’re a seed planting initiative. The biggest barrier is for students feeling that they can do it. And if they decide they can do it and they want to do it, they can work on bringing up the grades. They can work on reaching out to counselors, reaching out to universities, looking at the admissions web pages and finding out how they get in and working towards that goal. Once they set their mind to it, they can figure those things out.
“The roadshow is designed to inspire. To make it seem possible. The research tells us that rural kids are more likely to go back to the town they grew up in, or similar to the one they grew up in. They’re more likely to be comfortable in that rural geography and uncomfortable in a large city.”
He says tracking the impact of the roadshow is made even harder because sometimes, those seeds grow up to bear different fruit than simply doctors or nurses or lab techs. “Let’s say you plant a seed or somebody who’s in grade 10, and they decide to take biology in grade 11 and 12. And they weren’t planning on taking biology. Maybe they don’t go into medicine, but it does open up a different path for them and they go into horticulture. Or maybe somebody decided to graduate high school when they were thinking maybe they would just go work at the mine. We’ve had students who really wanted to do something in healthcare. They were already focused on a career in health care, and then they’ve seen the roadshow come through and go, ‘oh, actually, I don’t think I want to do that. I think I’m more interested in doing this other thing.’”
And sometime, it’s important to see someone like you doing something you thought someone like you couldn’t do. “There’s more women training in medicine now than men across the country. But that doesn’t mean everybody knows that. In a small town, where the only doctor who is a male and you’ve got a girl who’s interested in science, but doesn’t think many women are in medicine, and you bring some female medical students? That can be really inspiring. Or if you bring Indigenous students who are in health care careers and you’ve got an indigenous student in your high school and they haven’t seen indigenous people as physicians or as health care professionals? That can be really powerful. So there’s, there’s a lot of different potential for inspiration.”
One of the biggest issues is just making that decision, says Maurice, because healthcare can seems so different. So foreign. “Going to school and leaving your small community that can be expensive. It can seem far away. There are cultural differences going to a big city, even if that is only going from Tumbler to Prince George, let alone someplace like Vancouver.”
He says students who grew up in the big city tend to think big city hospitals have it all sorted out. “They think rural health care is not as good, or they don’t do things properly, but I think there’s a lot of research that says that’s backwards. That’s a deficit perspective. There’s a lot of strength in rural and one of the strengths without question is that we tend to be more common sense. And so if there’s a problem, we call it what it is, and we see it needs to be fixed. I think one of the big frustrations in healthcare is that it is such a big beast. There’s a lot of administration and a lot of complexity. And when a doctor or a nurse or a physio says ‘this doesn’t make sense,’ there isn’t really someone that they can say that to. There isn’t a way to make a change. It’s not straightforward. But in a small hospital? That’s usually pretty straightforward. They can fix those things. And so I think rural actually has a lot over the big city and I think bringing more rural trainees into these programs and into these professions is going to help. Certainly bringing more rural trainees into these programs to help address the rural workforce shortages is critical. That’s why we do the roadshow, and it’s as important now as it was pre-pandemic.
“But there’s also that additional piece where I think rural students can help inform our urban colleagues how to not make things so complicated. Over the last decades, medicine has become more bureaucratic. There’s more paperwork. That’s not reasonable. You have to think about a way to accommodate that. You have to work less in non-paperwork hours so that you have time to do the paperwork or you need to streamline the paperwork or you need to have someone else do it. I think that too much of that has happened in medicine. If smart, hardworking people are telling you: ‘look, I’m working more hours now and I was already working too many hours, because there’s all this extra paperwork,” then you got to pay attention to that.”
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
