BRANDON — Carberry’s gain is Roblin’s loss.
Dr. Dalia Bushara — who saw patients at the Roblin District Health Centre for almost two years — will start seeing patients at Carberry’s clinic, hospital and emergency room as of Monday.
Robert Misko, head of council for the Municipality of Roblin, said he holds no ill will toward Carberry.
“I by no means think that they tried to steal our doctor,” said Misko. “We don’t think that’s the issue. We wish Dr. Bushara the best. The community liked her, the patients she had will miss her, but I guess she made the decision she had to make.”
Carberry Mayor Ray Muirhead said while he is happy to welcome Bushara, he understands the impact it will have on Roblin.
“No community wants to gain a doctor at the expense of another community, but she has her kids registered for school in Brandon and she’s going to drive back and forth for now and at some point, maybe move to Carberry.”
Prairie Mountain Health came through for Carberry, Muirhead said.
The health authority’s chief medical officer, Dr. Adrian Fung, accompanied the mayor as they took Bushara on a community tour through “the hospital, the parks and Spruce Woods (park).”
“We gave her a wide snapshot of everything in the community and she liked what she saw,” said Muirhead. “So I posed the question — ‘Do you think you would come to Carberry?’ — and she said, ‘I’d love to come to Carberry.’
“And I thought, yes — one down, one to go,” he said.
Misko said Bushara’s departure from Roblin means the community is still short two doctors.
The “wish list” for Misko includes having four physicians. Last year at this time, Roblin had three. One returned to Ontario for family reasons, so now Misko said he’s hired an international recruiter.
“We’ve hired a recruiter called MPA, and their head office is in Derry, Ireland,” Misko said. “We had our initial meeting about two months ago and they told us it was going to take them one to three months to start the process and weed out their candidate list. So, we’re waiting for our first report.”
Part of the Roblin’s recruiting cost was paid by Prairie Mountain Health under its physician recruitment incentive that was initiated in May 2023 and discontinued this June.
The incentive was available to physician recruits who would provide regular and ongoing services to PMH facilities or programs and were willing to agree to a four-year return of service agreement.
Misko said it’s been difficult getting a four-year commitment.
“We’re not isolated that you can’t get out, but isolated enough that, depending on what you’re looking for, you’re three to five hours away from it at any point. That doesn’t help,” he said.
There is hope that next summer, Misko added, an international medical graduate may move to Roblin.
“We found her through a resident of the community who knew she was out there looking to get residency and to go through the process. So, our doctor recruitment committee was working with her, and she has all of her qualifications, wrote her exams and got into the residency program,” Misko said.
“Now it’s just a matter of getting through that, and the challenge is the time that it takes.”
The two communities may be hours apart, but the mayors have something in common when they talk about the risks of not having enough physicians.
Misko said his community of 3,400 that swells to 5,000 in the summer “can support the doctors, no problem there.”
“What is a problem, because we don’t have enough, we start to burn them out very quickly and that’s when the stress starts to add up and they start to drift somewhere else, looking for other opportunities.”
Muirhead said having Dr. Zaheed Fashola and Dr. Gerard Desmond filling shifts is helping to keep the Carberry emergency department open.
“But you also have to remember they have their own practices, they’re people too. You can’t expect them to be 24/7 or you’re going to burn them out and you’re back to square one,” he said.
— Brandon Sun