Jennifer Pritchett
Northern News Services

RANKIN INLET (Jul 10/98) - A Keewatin doctor who had intended to stay in the region for a year has resigned after the board failed to recruit more doctors to share the workload.

"He was having difficulty with the working conditions," said Jack MacKinnon, the Keewatin Regional Health Board's fourth CEO in six months.

"I think he had some difficulty with the kind of hours he was putting in."

Dr. Sidney McQueen Smith, Rankin Inlet's only resident doctor, resigned June 22 and left the community less than 48 hours later to return to Nanaimo, B.C. He could not be reached for comment.

MacKinnon said Smith had agreed to work in the region for a year if the board had successfully recruited more physicians. When this still hadn't happened five months after he was hired, Smith terminated his contract with the board.

While he said Smith had been working under the same conditions as other doctors who spent time in the Keewatin, MacKinnon does admit it's discouraging to lose a doctor because the board is unable to attract other physicians to the region.

To help compensate for the problem, he added, the board is looking at the possibility of paying the doctors more to keep them longer.

"They were compensated quite well, but we will look at the greatest compensation as possible within the budget," he said. "We're not moving as quickly as people would like to see, including myself."

Rankin Inlet councillor Levinia Brown said that she thought there had been some improvements made in the region's health care, but she is now afraid that little has changed in the six months since the situation reached a crisis point.

"To me, here we are again, back to square one," she said. "It seems they (the health board) were all gung ho then, but now it's going back again."

In the meantime, the board is no longer using Med-Emerg International Consulting to recruit doctors, but are taking a more aggressive approach by contacting physicians who have practices in southern Canada, as well as contacting medical schools to attract new graduates.

The Northern Medical Unit is providing physician services to the Keewatin in the interim period so that there will be no lapse in services.

The board is also expected to finalize a new contract with the Northern Medical Unit in the coming weeks.

"The re-establishing of the NMU is a great move," he added.