Chamber Partners Committed to Attracting Physicians

Health care is a significant issue for all of us and having access to health care professionals is critical to the well being of families in our region – the past two years have certainly highlighted this. However, many families, locally and across the province, do not have the benefit of being under the care of a family practitioner. Family physician recruitment is critical to meeting the primary health care needs of our rapidly growing population. The Physician Recruitment Program is a community health care initiative for the wellbeing of our residents and an economic development imperative for our businesses to ensure that they can attract the best and the brightest. With corporate and municipal support and investment, the Chamber has been able to create a very successful physician recruitment initiative. Working with community partners to address the physician shortage, the Chamber has attracted more than 280 family physicians since we took the lead to establish the program in 1998. Our generous corporate, municipal and personal partners are helping to better primary health care for all of us. It is important that they be recognized for their commitment. Their names and logos are listed here and we ask Chamber members to note who they are and to recognize them for their contributions. Our largest recruitment effort, the Annual Family Medicine Resident Event – a weekend long event previously held in person has been hosted in a virtual format the past two years. This new format allowed us to engage with prospective residents and physicians in a manner that was both informative and interactive. It also allowed us to expand our reach with attendees participating from across Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. This weekend has proven to be one of our most successful recruitment tools and has drawn many family physicians to local community practices over the past twenty two years. We have historically recruited three to four new family practitioners each year through this initiative alone. We look forward to welcoming back residents and their partners to an in-person weekend this fall.

We continue to be busy working with a number of family medicine residents nearing graduation, as well as established family practitioners looking to relocate to Kitchener-Waterloo. It is in times like this that our need to recruit becomes even more evident and important.

The Chamber’s recruitment efforts have been very successful over the years. Though we have made great strides in bringing physicians to our community, there is still a lot of work to be done as we continue to be challenged with rapid community growth and physicians reaching retirement. The Chamber Physician Recruitment Program efforts and initiatives are only made possible by the generous support and investment of our sponsors. Thank you for your leadership and contribution to this critical program. The Greater Kitchener Waterloo Chamber of Commerce thanks our front-line workers as they continue to provide healthcare and work tirelessly to protect us in these trying and unprecedented times.

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