N.B. Medical Scholarship Program Keeps Our Best And Brightest Practicing Here At Home
Natasha Glover is the first person in her family to go to university, and the first to go medical school as well.
The Fredericton native is in her first year at Memorial University in St. John’s on a scholarship from the New Brunswick Medical Education Foundation (NBMEDED), a win-win for Glover and the province’s residents in need of more doctors.
At the end of her schooling, she will return to the province for four years to practice as part of the requirements of the foundation’s scholarship program.
NBMEDED’s goals dovetail nicely with her own, as it was already part of her plan to come back to New Brunswick to help address the physician shortages across the province.
“Prior to attending medical school, I worked for a non-profit in Fredericton and I was very involved in the healthcare area, and I had seen that as a gap – the lack of physicians,” she says.
The foundation was launched by Dr. Donald Craig in 2010 to help recruit and retain doctors in a province that struggles with long waiting lists for family physicians. As of December of last year, nearly 40,000 people were without a general practitioner.
Over the years, the foundation has become an important part of addressing this shortage. In 10 years, it has awarded 130 scholarships and continues to grow in numbers. At last year’s ceremony in August, it awarded 41 bursaries for a total of $303,000.
“We’re the only private, not-for-profit foundation in Canada that does this,” says Darren McLeod, the foundation’s executive director.
There’s a great need, he says, for an outside organization to help with the recruitment and retention of more doctors. “When you consider waiting list,” he says, “the need is quite significant.”
The waiting list itself includes residents in all parts of the province, so the foundation is careful to award scholarships to students from a variety of communities, large and small, places like Chance Harbour, Tracadie, Carlingford, Sackville and Burton.
The foundation also places a strong emphasis on the province’s anglophone and francophone medical programs with students enrolled at the Dalhousie Medicine New Brunswick school in Saint John and the Universite de Moncton, which has a joint program with the Universite de Sherbrook.
The scholarships, awarded on a year-by-year basis, range from $5,000 – $12,000 and go a long way toward helping New Brunswick medical students pay for an expensive education.
“These scholarships help alleviate the costs. These students are from all walks of life, all corners of the province,” says McLeod.
Glover says NBMEDED is a “stress-free” source of funding with students being approached by banks about financing their educations with high-interest loans. Medical school is stressful enough, she says, without the added burden of financing it.
Even though they’re only expected to practice in the province for four years after they graduate, McLeod says there’s a good chance they’ll stay in the long-term because they’ve begun to build lives and practices here.
“When they’re four years in, whether they’re in family medicine or are a specialist at a hospital or elsewhere in the healthcare system, they’re typically going to stay,” he says. “They’ve bought a building or they’re leasing space. They’ve hired staff and become part of the community.”
The foundation has more than $6-million invested to support bursaries, and a generous, but relatively small group of donors. It’s now looking for additional small and large donors to support more students year to year, and help bring down that waiting list.
We want to double the amount of scholarships. In four- or five-years-time, I would love to see us giving out 80 or more scholarships. It could be a game-changer.”
McLeod says the benefits of the program go beyond the provision of primary healthcare to New Brunswick residents. It’s also an economic development tool because companies in the region, and ones looking at establishing operations here, want to know their employees can access healthcare services.
“One of the biggest issues for bringing big employers into this region is access to a physician,” says McLeod.
Jason Downey, co-chair of the foundation, says the broad impact is what attracted him to the organization.
“This foundation has an impact on every New Brunswicker in trying to provide and support, and create a future for healthcare in our province,” says Downey. “It also creates employment and economic development. The spin-off has an impact on everyone that lives in our province.”
And the province and NBMEDED have an eager supply of students willing to return to the province, given the opportunity and financial assistance. She’s meeting some of them in her first year at Memorial.
“There are a few New Brunswick students who go here, and we frequently talk about those sorts of things and it’s certainly something we want to tackle.”
“It’s also something the school is trying to tackle by selecting students that want to help, the kind that wants to give back to their communities.”
For more information or to make donations to NBMEDED, visit the foundation web site: https://www.nbmeded.ca/home-1-1