Numbers matter, and not just the numbers on a balance sheet.
Belleville Council agreed yesterday to add $160,000 to what we still call the Belleville Family Physician Recruitment Program to allow for yet more signings to happen. It was a timely motion as they announced four more people signed on the dotted line yesterday alone, one of which is a Psychiatrist (improving our collective mental health as well as physical).
There was also another in a series of discussions of where the money should come from, which also (naturally) invokes the usual talk about health care being a provincial responsibility, not a local one.
That discussion isn’t new, as I remember it well from the year 2007.
You see, just a short time after Hastings County announced a similar program, Belleville originally launched the Doctor Recruitment Program.
Since then, 70 physicians and 10 nurse practitioners have signed on to set up shop in Belleville.
The program is the envy of most cities large and small in the entire province, and the pace of success is increasing exponentially.
At the start of the current term of council, there was a goal to sign 30 physicians recruited over a 5-10 year span. In less than four, that number is now 27. In the first 15 years of the program, that number was 43.
A strong partnership with Queen’s University, a new focus on foreign-trained doctors and the leadership of Karen Poste have made a huge difference for thousands of local families. There is a definite cost involved, but the citizens of the Friendly City are better off and much healthier because of this investment in our collective future.
I’m Paul Martin and that’s what I see looking Beyond the Headlines.
