The Province recently put out a news release detailing the ways they're recruiting more doctors and physicians across Manitoba. Since 2024, the Province has added 137 new physicians - 18 of them here in the Prairie Mountain Health region.
Treena Slate, PMH CEO, said these 18 new physicians have been placed all across the Parkland. Though one of the areas Slate wants to see improve is the recruiting and retention of nurses across the region, which is starting to show some good signs.
"We've recruited people, physicians throughout the entire region, 11 were recruited to Dauphin, and the rest were recruited to several rural communities throughout the region. In that, we also recruited some specialists, including general surgeons, a couple emergency room physicians, and a respiratory specialist in Brandon...we are staying fairly stable with our nursing vacancy rates, but starting to see some optimistic numbers there, some improvements in recruiting and retaining locally, so that's very good," said Slate.
Slate said they've also recruited a number of assistants to help physicians free up some of their time to treat more patients, and promote a higher level of quality in their care.
"Physician assistants, clinical assistants, we've hired in a number of locations throughout the region, which has been a huge help to physicians in shoring up their services and providing increased capacity for the work they do," said Slate.
One of the areas Slate hopes to continue expanding is their partnerships with educational institutions, like Assiniboine College, to promote home-grown training and recruitment initiatives, which are starting to boost their numbers. The Province recently increased the number of training seats in certain healthcare-related programs.
"It's gonna take a little while for those programs, of course, to start graduating enough people for us to be able to hire, so we're starting to see the beginning success of those increases in those training programs, and so we're optimistic that there's hope on the horizon for improvements," said Slate.
For now, Prairie Mountain Health's staffing is good, but they could always use more doctors, nurses, and related staff, especially as they continue to restore services to the Dauphin Regional Health Centre.
