Aboriginal med students gain schooling options

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Aboriginal students from Northern Ontario may soon be able to complete their medical education without moving far from home, thanks to plans for a new medical school in the area.

The Northern Ontario Medical School (NOMS), the first new medical school in Canada in more than 30 years, will be divided between two campuses, one at Laurentian University in Sudbury, the other at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay. Each campus will cater to a difference sector of the northern population, with the Laurentian campus focusing on providing medical training to francophone students from the North, and the Lakehead campus concentrating on Aboriginal students.

Mick Lowe is a communications officer with NOMS. He explained that the new school will provide northern students wanting to study medicine with a setting to which they will find it easier to adapt. Currently, the only option open to these students is to attend one of the country's 16 existing medical schools, "all of which are in urban centres, and generally at big universities," he said.

"The experience has been that northerners tend not to get in as much. The acceptance rate is lower. And the feeling is they're just disadvantaged. Because urban centres are a different culture... The values can be different between the north and the south and the urban and the rural, and so on. Also, there are cultural issues for Aboriginal students and francophone students. The values for the other medical schools may not be the same as for people from those communities, and so there's a bit of a clash sometimes," said Lowe.

Details about exactly how NOMS will accommodate its Aboriginal students, and how it can prepare all its students to work within Aboriginal communities, have yet to be worked out. As part of that process, a special Aboriginal consultation workshop is taking place June 10 to 12 at Wauzhushk Onigum First Nation about three kilometres southwest of Kenora. The workshop, which will be open to the news media, will be conducted as a talking circle. The consultation is being planned in co-operation with the Union of Ontario Indians, Treaty 3, and Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN). It is the first of a series of community workshops planned.

"We're going to bring in about 150 Elders, chiefs, traditional healers, students from First Nations across the North. And we're going to sit down and listen to them and answer that very question, or try to... how can we develop this school in a way that will be most helpful to First Nations people in Northern Ontario? And that means both students coming in from the communities, but also then docs going back. What do they need to know? What do the communities need most? And what's the best way to teach all of this? And at this point it's all open. We don't have the answers. We're seeking the answers."

While providing northern students with a more culturally familiar setting in which to learn, the goal of NOMS is also to train doctors in the North so they will stay in the North.

"It's been tried in other jurisdictions in other countries. It's been tried in the Scandinavian countries. It's been tried in Australia. And the clear consensus is that if you take northern students, train them in the North for northern conditions, that the chances they will stay in the North are far, far greater than if they go south for their training.

So we're not doing anything, proving anything, that hasn't been tried or tested in the past in other places. It's just we're the first in Canada," Lowe said.

Getting enough doctors to practice in the North continues to be a problem, he explained.

"It's a huge problem. It's an enduring problem. Here in Sudbury, and this is an urban place, this is 160,000 people, it's the twentieth largest city in Canada. I think I read the other day we're short 30 family doctors, and certain specialists as well. And you know, we're really not that far north either, when it comes to that," said Lowe. "So if you're having trouble n the major urban centres like Sudbury, you can bet your boots that smaller communities are having even more problems.

"Across the board, the most crushing shortage is of family doctors, general practitioners. Really, the entry-level point into the medical system, the health care system, for the average family or the average patient. What's known as primary health care. And the system just isn't producing enough of them. And as a matter of fact, we're producing fewer all the time. More specialists, fewer generalists. And NOMS has been created specifically to counter that. We're going to be training family doctors and generalists to fill that need in the North and the rural and remote areas."

One of the challenges NOMS still must face is obtaining its accreditation as a medical school. The process, Lowe explained, is long and involved, and the results are far from guaranteed. In fact, the last medical school in North America to seek accreditation, one in Florida that started up last fall, failed their accreditation the first time around.

"This is no gimme. This is a very arduous and complex task, and you have to have faculty, you have to have curriculum, you have to have buildings, you have to have answers to any and all questions they may ask before they're going to accredit your school. And it takes time. It just takes time. And you can't afford to fail. You have to get it right the first time out," he said.

Because of everything involved in preparing for accreditation, Lowe said, some thought is being given to putting the official opening of the school off for an additional year.

"Officially, our target date is still the fall of '04, but there is some serious consideration being given right now to delaying for a year until the fall of '05. We're studying this very intensely right now internally, and we're going to have a decision in early June, which date to pick."

For more information on NOMS consultation workshops, contact either the NOMS-West communicatons officer, Michael O'Reilly, at 807-229-7746 (e-mail: michael.oreilly@normed.ca) or the NOMS-East communications officer, Mick Lowe, at 705-969-7213

(e-mail: mick.lowe@normed.ca). The NOMS Web site is www.normed.ca.