Last month in Sault Ste. Marie, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) celebrated the volunteers of the Bring a Doctor Home Hockey Tournament at an event called Be Awesome with NOSM. At this event, the tournament volunteers presented NOSM with a cheque for $26,000 to support student bursaries for medical students who consider Sault Ste. Marie home.

Each year, volunteer employees, retirees, and friends lace up their skates to participate in the charity Bring a Doctor Home hockey tournament that raises donations for medical students at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine who hail from Sault Ste. Marie. In the last twelve years, the tournament raised more than $350,000 for student bursaries.

“The volunteers of the Bring a Doctor Home Hockey Tournament provide a shining example of how, when people come together, we can truly inspire positive change in our communities,” says Dr. Roger Strasser, NOSM Dean. “We are grateful for Sault Ste. Marie’s generous and long-standing support of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, and extremely pleased to see many NOSM-trained graduates from the Sault Ste. Marie returning home to practice upon completion of their training.”

“For many, this tournament is about a lot more than hockey,” says Chris Lepore, Tournament Executive Director. “The Bring a Doctor Home Hockey Tournament is one way that we as a community can invest in the future health of our citizens. We are proud to partner with NOSM to support home-grown health professionals who share a passion for this community with us.”

Dr. James Goertzen, Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) Assistant Dean, Continuing Education and Professional Development, and Professor, and Dr. Frances Kilbertus, NOSM Associate Professor, are among six distinguished educators to receive a 2017 AMS Phoenix Fellowship award.

The Fellowship from AMS Healthcare (Associated Medical Services) is awarded each year and specifically targets individuals with strong leadership abilities who are committed to nurturing and sustaining the learning and practice of compassionate care. The intent of the Fellowship is to provide support (the equivalent of $50,000) to individuals to allow them to devote time to engage in leadership activities, building capacity in their home institution and across Ontario.

Based in Thunder Bay, Goertzen’s project will explore the relationship between compassionate leadership and the practice of compassionate patient care and compassionate health-care education.

“Improving the health of Northern Ontario at individual and system levels will require committed and well trained health-care leaders who see their clinical, educational, and leadership work through a compassionate lens,” Goertzen says. “The overall goal of my Fellowship is to further develop and sustain the compassionate physician leadership required to support learning and practice of compassionate care in Northern Ontario.”

Dr. Frances Kilbertus, who works at the Manitoulin Central Family Health Team and Manitoulin Health Centre in Mindemoya, is focusing her Fellowship on projects that explore how the community, the workplace, health professionals and learners are interwoven in a process of learning and practising palliative care in the culturally diverse rural community on Manitoulin Island.

“The focus for the first year of the fellowship will be exploring community involvement, creating opportunities for engagement and dialogue around death and dying, and developing learning tools for palliative care that are inclusive of an Indigenous perspective,” Kilbertus says. “The second year will focus on the rural clinical workplace: how learners and practitioners understand and appreciate palliative care and how compassionate learning environments are created and sustained.”

“The Northern Ontario School of Medicine was founded on a strong social accountability mandate,” says Roger Strasser, NOSM Dean and CEO. “These fellowships, which advance compassionate care within the health-care community and sustain compassion in the environments in which health professionals learn and work, fit perfectly with the School’s distributed, community-engaged, learning-centered model of education and research.”

Since 2011, more than 160 family physicians educated by the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) have begun to practice in Northern Ontario. This means that approximately 190,000 Northern Ontarians have improved access to a family doctor thanks to NOSM’s presence. This data, among other information about NOSM’s impact on the region, was published in the School’s recent Report to Northern Ontario 2017.

“We started tracking this data as of 2011 because it took at least that long before our first class of students were able to practice independently,” says Dr. Roger Strasser, NOSM Dean. “It takes four years to complete the MD program, and then graduates must enter residency in a medical specialty. Residency can take two to eight years. This means that NOSM-educated health professionals who entered medical school in NOSM’s charter class in 2005 began to open up practices in 2011.”

NOSM’s Report to Northern Ontario was created to report back to the communities of the North about the School’s progress in addressing the priority health concerns of the region. In addition to training physicians, NOSM has:

• Graduated 123 Registered Dietitians, approximately 90 of whom are now working in rural, Northern, or remote communities.
• Collaborated with more than 90 communities in Northern Ontario to provide education across the region.
• Focused its research initiatives on answering health questions relevant to the people and communities of Northern Ontario.
• Contributed more than $100 million of new economic activity in Northern Ontario.

Ninety-four percent of NOSM graduates who have completed both their MD and residency programs at NOSM are now practising in Northern Ontario. “We are very excited that NOSM’s model is proving successful in improving access to healthcare for the people and communities of Northern Ontario,” says Strasser. “But there is still much work to be done. Northern Ontario communities continue to face a broad range of health challenges, with some communities continuing to struggle with maintaining medical services. We are eager to continue our work together to advance the health of the people of Northern Ontario.”

All Northern Ontarians are encouraged to read NOSM’s Report to Northern Ontario. This report will also be available in clinics and waiting rooms across Northern Ontario. Hard copies can be requested by contacting NOSM’s Communications Unit at communications@nosm.ca or 807-766-7452. In addition, any interested parties are welcome to contact to the School to inquire about how they can get involved in supporting NOSM and its partners in improving the health of Northern Ontario.