The Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) is receiving some assistance from Tbaytel.
The company unveiled an Entrance Award Fund Friday that looks to raise $30,000 for three students from northern Ontario every dollar donated up to $10,000 being matched by Tbaytel.
“We need something like 313 doctors in northern Ontario right now today,” explains Dr. Bill McCready, NOSM’s Special Advisor and Senior Associate Dean. “Today in Thunder Bay, we need 10 family doctors as a minimum. There are 20,000 people in Thunder Bay that say they don’t have a family doctor. We need about three times that many specialists in Thunder Bay, so right now it’s about equal, maybe a little more specialists than non-specialists across the north that we need, so we are under resourced and we have always been under resourced.”
Dr. McCready says they often choose students with a connection to rural, northern Canada as they are more likely to return to practice in the region. Less than 5 per cent of students that attend NOSM come from large cities, which does not include Thunder Bay and Sudbury.
Tbaytel President and CEO Dan Topatigh explains more about the importance of this partnership and fund.
“I think we’ve always looked for opportunities throughout the region we serve to be able to give back to the community,” says Topatigh. “We always look for strategic partnerships as well, and we’ve identified NOSM as one of those strategic partnerships largely on the fact we have countless employees and customers who work in this region and we understand the need that exists for doctors and specialists. We recognize this as an opportunity to show our support, to keep doctors in northern Ontario as much as possible.”
If you are interested in donating, you can go here.