Some doctors raise concerns over proposal for new medical school in Cape Breton

Two local doctors are questioning a campaign by Cape Breton University to create its own medical school in Sydney, N.S.

Dr. Stephanie Langley is a family doctor in North Sydney who oversees a program for family medicine residencies offered to doctors in training at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

"We're a small province and for a province this size to be running two independent medical schools, I'm not sure if that's money well spent," said Langley.

"[We're] already very busy with people being involved in teaching and just thinking of expanding that further to a medical school is quite the leap, and so, I just have concerns about people's time and space to be able to undertake this."

Langley said rather than putting money into brick-and-mortar school buildings, taxpayer dollars would be better spent expanding residency training into rural areas.

"People are very busy clinically and so the pandemic has, if anything ... put us a bit behind," said Langley. "Clinicians are very busy providing care to patients, and in order to teach you have to take time away. We would need ... more clinicians, more faculty members to be able to have people take time away to teach."

In Cape Breton, some local doctors are helping teach students through three residency programs run by Dalhousie University, along with its clerkship program for third-year students.

Dr. Faith Dodd works as an associate professor with Dalhousie University from Sydney. She said there are already struggles to find doctors to teach in those programs. 

"We would just have a trail of students following us around," Dodd said of the project proposal put forward by CBU.

"The biggest concern for me is that of patient care. It takes away from our clinical time and we can barely cover the clinical portion of practice."

Dodd said that there are several pathways to getting more doctors into rural areas, such as recruiting more students who grew up in those communities. 

"It's an Atlantic Canadian problem and I think it's probably not something that's easily solved with one solution," she said. "Looking at increasing family physician spots and increasing positions with some type of incentive … would certainly help."

This is not the first time CBU has considered its own medical school.

Former president John Harker said he brought the idea forward to community leaders in 2012, not long before his retirement.

Harker said the value of such a school is even more apparent today given the challenges in Nova Scotia's healthcare system.

CBU could set itself apart from other medical schools by blazing a trail on topics such as deficits in Indigenous health in Canada, he added. 

"It seemed to me that Sydney, given its location, and its growing record of partnering with our Mi'kmaq communities, would be the right place to have a really interesting medical school, so you know, that's where it grew out of."

Harker said the response was lukewarm when he first pitched the idea. 

"There were a few people who came back and said 'It's something to think about in the future,' but there was also a surprising amount of silence." 

Last week, CBU president David Dingwall said the university is attempting to address the lack of primary care physicians in the province. He said CBU's proposal would focus on training doctors for work in rural practices and will result in the establishment of a collaborative medical clinic that would serve up to 10,000 patients. 

On a list of work completed so far, the university says it has spent a year discussing the project with more than 100 local doctors.

CBU is also piloting a program with Dalhousie University to fund five medical school seats for students from rural Nova Scotia to study at the Halifax university. The students must commit to working five years in a rural area after graduation.

Dingwall said that CBU is also in talks with an unnamed university about becoming a partner in the project.

A spokesperson for Dalhousie's Faculty of Medicine told CBC News this week that it does not have any details to share regarding CBU's proposal.