THUNDER BAY - With the growing need for doctors and specialists throughout the north and the significant expense of medical training, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine is partnering with Tbaytel to help reduce the costs for medical students in the hopes they will remain in Northern Ontario.
“We need something like 313 doctors in Northern Ontario right now today,” said Dr. Bill McCready, senior associate dean and special advisor to the dean for NOSM.
“In Thunder Bay we need 10 family doctors as a minimum. There are about 20,000 people in Thunder Bay who say they don’t have a family doctor. We need about three times the number of specialists in Thunder Bay. We are under-resourced and we’ve always been under-resourced.”
On Friday, Tbaytel and NOSM announced the creation of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine’s Tbaytel Entrance Award Fund.
Dan Topatigh, president and CEO of Tbaytel, said they will match every dollar donated toward the scholarship up to $10,000. NOSM is hoping to raise a total of $30,000 for the Tbaytel Entrance Award per year, which will be awarded to three students from Northern Ontario with $10,000 each.
“We’ve always looked for opportunities throughout the region we serve to give back to the community,” he said. “We always look for strategic partnerships as well and we identified NOSM as one of those strategic partnerships largely on the fact that we have countless employees and customers who work in this region and we understand the need that exists for doctors and specialists.”
According to McCready, many students will often seek higher paying jobs in the medical field in other parts of the country in order to offset the high costs of education.
“Student bursaries are an essential part of students being able to enter medical school,” he said. “It’s an extremely expensive proposition. The average student leaves their undergraduate medical education with $190,000 in debt. That is a huge amount to take on.”
The selection process for NOSM includes priority given to students with connections to Northern Ontario and rural communities in the hope they will remain in the region.
“We need generalists. We need rural doctors and doctors who serve Indigenous communities,” McCready said. “While that pays a reasonable, generous salary, it doesn’t pay the highest salaries you can get, so we really want our students to have less debt when they graduate.”
“We recognize this as an opportunity to show our support to be able to keep doctors in Northern Ontario as much as possible,” Topatigh added.
Visit Tbaytel For Good webpage if you wish to donate.
