KILLARNEY — It took more than a year, but a family physician from England who was headhunted to practise in Manitoba owing to a doctor shortage, has settled in to this southwestern Manitoba town with his wife and five children.
Dr. Jim Heptinstall has been seeing patients at the Tri-Lake Health Centre since early September and said his family is settling in “really well.”
“Our oldest is about to turn 15 and our youngest just turned six. We involved them in the decision-making, and they were really excited about it,” he said.
Killarney’s two new family physicians, Dr. Jim Heptinstall (left) and Dr. Dominic Hennessy (Michele McDougall / The Brandon Sun)
“We first started this journey over a year ago when we met with Waterford Global (a Winnipeg executive search firm hired by the town) and we came to visit Killarney… during the first week of October,” Heptinstall said.
Heptinstall is one of two family physicians from England — the other is Dr. Dominic Hennessy — who recently moved to the community after being recruited.
Heptinstall is from Nottingham, and Hennessy is originally from Yorkshire, but had practised in Bournemouth, on the southeast coast of the England, for the last 13 years.
Both physicians visited parts of the Killarney-Turtle Mountain area last fall and accepted their positions within a few months of each other.
Hennessy and his partner have two greyhounds. Other than a “stressful day loading the dogs at Heathrow Airport, flying them to Chicago and then driving north, it was a good journey,” he said.
“Then we took a trip up north that was really good fun, up to Flin Flon, to Snow Lake, and down to the New Iceland Museum in Gimli, so that was kind of cool,” Hennessy said. “It was a good long trip.”
Hennessy treated patients in Killarney in August and used his vacation to cover other shifts, which he said helped him get acquainted with the area and its residents.
He said there are many reasons he chose to move to Killarney — it made financial sense, he’s getting older, he’ll be “50 next year” — and he looks forward to mentoring and working with medical school students on placement.
“I have an interest in education,” Hennessy said. “I was lecturing for Bournemouth and Winchester universities, and teaching for (National Health Service) England, teaching family physicians to become family physician trainers. So, I bring that along with me,” he said.
The National Health Service for England is one of four NHS systems in the U.K. that provide free public health administered by the government.
Hennessy and Heptinstall have arrived in Manitoba at a time when it has the second-lowest number of physicians per capita in Canada, as per a survey by Doctors Manitoba, a non-partisan advocacy group.
In April, Premier Wab Kinew and Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara announced a provincewide goal to hire 100 doctors in one year to address the shortage in the province.
Heptinstall said when he read newspaper stories about new doctor hires, he remarked, “So, I guess I’m one of those.”
“It’s nice to be appreciated and know that people want you to be here,” he said. “And for me as a physician, you just put your head down and see the patients that are there in front of you.”
This year’s provincial budget referred to building an annex at Brandon University that will eventually house a medical school in partnership with the University of Manitoba. The plan is to train 10 to 16 students each year in Brandon.
Hennessy said training students right out of school in smaller areas will help fix the rural physician shortage.
“If you already have a medical school with placements into rural communities and seeing how (doctors) practise differently there, that’s probably going to mean that more people might take an interest in rural medicine,” Hennessy said.
Killarney Mayor Janice Smith said even though it took about a year for Waterford Global to find both physicians and then have Prairie Mountain Health offer them return-of-service agreements, it’s been a success.
“It works because you are not placing, you are matching. You’re matching the community to the doctor, and that’s what you want,” Smith said.
“We get that we can’t keep them here forever. We understand that people have lives, and no one would ever commit forever. But we want them to enjoy Killarney like we enjoy Killarney, and hopefully make it their home and make a career out of it.”
Smith was instrumental in hiring Waterford Global in 2016 to recruit Dr. Mark Bemment from the United Kingdom, who still practises in the community.
“It’s surreal that everything is working out as well as can be expected,” said Smith. “We knew that it wasn’t going to happen overnight, that it would be a process.”
— Brandon Sun