Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry celebrates 25 years of medical practice in regional Ontario

For 25 years, medical students at Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry have “discovered” first-hand what life and medical practice in Southwestern Ontario have to offer through Discovery Week.

The first-of-its-kind mandatory program immerses the school’s budding doctors in communities from Owen Sound to Windsor for a full week at the end of first year. It is also a bright light in the desperate physician shortages faced by many regions in this part of the province.

Since its beginning in 1998, Discovery Week has placed approximately 3,700 students in regional communities – many of whom eventually return to practice medicine in those very places.

“So many of our students reference their Discovery Week experience when they start to map out their future path,” said Dr. George Kim, currently associate dean, admissions at Schulich Medicine, who did his Discovery Week in Tillsonburg, Ontario. He most recently served as assistant dean, distributed education.

“Our graduates overwhelmingly remember their Discovery Week experience – the patients they met, the health care workers, the community and how it embraced them. Getting a taste of life and medicine in a different community can be a defining factor in where they choose to be a doctor.”

This year, more than 170 students will be located in 29 participating areas.

“What Discovery Week does for our students after a year of study is reconnect them with why they came to medical school in the first place,” said Kim. “To this point, they have been ‘drinking from the firehose.’ But what better way to cap off first year than with the experience of seeing real people receiving real health care in real communities in southwestern Ontario.”

Student experiences range from visiting patients in a variety of health-care settings – emergency, urgent care, and inpatient care – to working with nurses, personal support workers, emergency medical services staff and community pharmacists. Off-hours are used to immerse students in the community through participation in local events.

As a first-year MD student, Dr. Adam Fehr, MD’12, experienced Discovery Week in Chatham, Ont., and later returned to the community as a general surgeon.

“Discovery Week is the first time you truly see what community medicine is really like,” said Fehr. “And because of my interest in general surgery, I really got to see what a general surgeon does. It was about discovering medicine outside of the academic side.”

Many, like Fehr, returned to the communities where they did their placements. Others, like Dr. Amita Dayal, MD’03, settled down in rural communities elsewhere in Ontario.

Immersed in the community

Dayal went to Strathroy for her Discovery Week experience, which opened her eyes to the scope of family medicine in a rural community. She also spent two summers in Goderich, one spent reviewing student evaluations of Discovery Week, and then presented the findings at the Wonca Rural Medicine Conference in Australia.

“These rural experiences really opened peoples’ eyes to what family practice can be like,” said Dayal, who grew up in Scarborough and entered the University of Toronto’s Rural Residency Program in Family Medicine in Port Perry, north of Toronto, where she decided to start a practice and a family.

“Depending on the community, students see family doctors doing anesthesia work, coroner work, emergency room work, obstetrics and gynecology, and long-term and palliative care work,” said Dayal. “When I was in Strathroy, one day I’d be working with a family doctor in the office, and the next day, I’d have an emergency room shift.”

Even now, she has residents who tell her that the family medicine practice is very different than what they thought it would be.

Discovery Week is also a transition point where medicine stops being an academic pursuit and becomes real, said Dr. Ian Hons, regional academic director for Oxford County, whose duties include bringing students on board for Discovery Weeks in Woodstock, Tillsonburg and Ingersoll. Oxford County has hosted 148 learners since the program began.

“They see real, living patients in front of their eyes,” said Hons. “It’s a special time when you see what you’re learning and planning to do has real impact on real people to improve their lives.”

Discovery Week has also helped meet a very real need in finding physicians for Southwestern Ontario, said Hons and also Jan McKague-Weishar, recruitment officer for Listowel Wingham Hospitals Alliance, in Listowel and Wingham.

“Across Oxford County in nearly every community, you’re going to see a new subdivision going up,” said Hons. “At one point, we had an estimate in Woodstock that approximately 20,000 people didn’t have a physician or were geographically isolated from their physician, which is to say they had moved from somewhere else.”

Hons recalled when he opened his family practice in 2021, his waitlist was full within 12 hours. Demand for other services, such as paediatrics, orthopedics, surgery and anesthesiology, is also growing.

McKague-Weishar noted how much their communities have grown, leaving many people without physician care. Programs like Discovery Week have an effect, she said. But the seed planted can often take a while to sprout.

“We’d take more students if we could, but the reality is we only have so many physician preceptors,” said McKague-Weishar, who has hosted approximately 120 Discovery Week students between Listowel and Wingham.