Quadra Island’s struggle to find a replacement doctor reflects a crisis playing out in rural communities across the province.
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When Betty Doak heard that one of Quadra Island’s family doctors was retiring, she was not surprised. She’d been through it before.
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In 2016, the island’s previous physician wanted to leave and nobody was lined up to take over. Doak, a retired nurse who has lived on Quadra for more than 50 years, helped found the Quadra Island Health Society in 2018 to manage the clinic through the gap. Eventually, they found Dr. Steve Hughes.
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Now Hughes is preparing to retire in September from the Quadra Island Medical Clinic, which serves roughly half of the island’s 2,700 residents. And the community decided they couldn’t wait for the system to act.
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The Quadra Island Health Society partnered with the Quadra Island Foundation to raise $50,000 to hire a professional recruiter for physicians. The community exceeded that goal in under two weeks.
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“It’s a very tight community,” Doak said. “When something comes up and needs to be done, there’s lots of people who step forward and volunteer to do it.”
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Paul Adams, executive-director of the B.C. Rural Health Network, said roughly 40 per cent of B.C. family physicians are currently at retirement age, and every rural community in the province is actively trying to recruit.
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“Quadra is an example of that fragility of the system, where you have long-term family doctors, and the age of the practitioners is resulting in their inability to continue to provide those services,” he said.
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Hughes arrived on Quadra by accident.
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He came to Canada from the U.K. in 2014, settling in Mission, where he practised for five years. On a family vacation to Vancouver Island, he met the doctor who was then preparing to retire from the Quadra Island Medical Clinic.
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“She said they were having trouble recruiting anyone,” Hughes recalled. “I said, ‘I’ll stop for a few years’. But sort of seven years later, I’m still here.”
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Now it’s his turn to leave, and the recruitment challenge persists, partly because of the generational shift.
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“New doctors don’t particularly want to come to rural areas,” Doak said. “Doctors who are retiring might be interested in coming, but we don’t offer some of the amenities that people are looking for.”
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Hughes says replacing one full-time doctor now takes two or three younger physicians, each wanting a wider variety of work.
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A recruiter from Victoria has been hired and is actively searching, but is having difficulty finding candidates. Adams said communities such as Quadra that have the social networks and fundraising capacity to act are the fortunate ones. Many don’t.
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Life expectancy on the north end of Vancouver Island sits at 74 years, compared to 82 in Victoria, Adams said. He attributes this eight-year difference to decades of underinvestment in rural health care infrastructure.
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“We need to change a system from focusing on urban populations to one which starts at the edges and works its way in,” he said.
