| Reasons for choosing Barrie |
Both my husband and I, our families are from this part of Ontario so we wanted to come down this way. Small town feel despite being a relatively big city … close access to lots of outdoor stuff, that’s what appealed to me. I liked the horizontal training … the opportunity to have my own roster. To be doing comprehensive care and looking after my patients the entire time was much more attractive versus the block system.
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| Strength of the program |
I don’t regret anything and I don’t feel like I missed anything … speaking with my peers who were downtown … I think I had a better experience … Just the learning opportunities I was able to have and the one-on-one relationship with the staff … people sought me out to do interesting things or … to give me additional opportunities to do things I was interested in. In medical school … when there’s only one baby to be delivered and there’s a family medicine resident and an obstetrics resident, the obstetrics resident did it. When there was only one surgery to be done, the surgery resident did it, not the family medicine resident … whereas in Barrie … any good learning opportunity is yours for the taking. You weren’t the resident seeing Dr X’s patients, I was their doctor … If there’s something very sensitive, some of the patients were uncomfortable because they’d formed a bond with Dr X for years. Sometimes then, the resident misses out on those opportunities, whereas I was it. Almost all of them would say things like, “Hey, we love doing this. We learn as much from you residents as you learn from us” … It really makes you feel good about what you’re doing … [it was] a very collegial atmosphere in which the preceptors respected the residents just as much as we respected our preceptors.
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| Outcome of training in Barrie |
I stayed in Barrie because I did my residency here, for sure. I liked all the different physicians and different people I met and I liked the community and so it was an easy decision for me to just stay here afterwards. It felt like it would be professionally very hard to go somewhere else … Networking is a huge part and you create friendships amongst the medical staff … I already knew the family health team … and I knew there was lots of need for family doctors … there was absolutely no reason to leave. There were patients that I started seeing and I saw them for the whole two years. And, actually, a bunch of those patients, I took on as patients when I transferred here to practice. So, I actually have still about 100 patients that I followed five years ago and I’m still following now. Well there’s probably 20 physicians who are now here who would not have been here otherwise. I never would have come to Barrie if I didn’t do residency here. And from a direct service standpoint, I work walk-in clinics … and I see more patients who need to be seen because I have a resident with me. The Family Medicine Teaching Unit takes on pretty much any patient that applies and there’s a whole bunch of patients in Barrie that lack a family physician … And I think the care they get at the FMTU is top notch. You’ve been managing very difficult patients for two years, so you get out and do your locums or family practice and it just feels like you’re just continuing on what you’ve been doing … It really gives you that confidence. From every aspect I felt like I had been doing it all myself already. Checking my labs, following up with patients, feeling that responsibility … so, for the core, comprehensive family medicine piece, I felt quite prepared.
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| Opportunity for change |
The teachers who were the best came prepared with something in mind that they wanted to teach around … and then were also flexible to bringing in cases from that day or from our experience into the conversation … It was less effective when they just sat down and were like, “What do you want to talk about today?” … You hear some good stories maybe that way but don’t have as many take-away points from it. Some of the specialists were unsure as to how much independence to provide … So some maybe didn’t provide quite enough experience and I was functioning more sometimes as a clerk … and sometimes were providing too much and wanted you to do things that probably were not appropriate … We were always encouraged … to let people know, in either direction, what would be more appropriate … so it was a gradually decreasing problem. Even though some physicians definitely made an effort to talk about things like billing and stuff, I feel like it needs to be formalized a little bit better during the two years … Despite some of the help I had with billing … I still felt like a deer in the headlights when I first started working. I think the horizontal model is a great model to learn under safely because you have the option to see small volumes initially and then build that up. But in no way, at the end of a two-year residency, was I seeing anything close to the volume that is expected in, A: a clinical practice or, B: even financially feasible to pay off debt.
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