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As thousands of medical school students mull where to work after they graduate, there are questions about whether Prince Edward Island is doing enough to recruit them to this province.
During a legislative committee meeting this week, Health P.E.I. interim CEO Laurae Kloschinsky told MLAs about the health authority’s efforts to bring in physicians.
She said there is focus on recruitment across the system as well as significant concentration on retainment.
Green Party MLA Karla Bernard told CBC News she’s been hearing from medical students who are from the Island and are studying in other provinces who say they never received a recruitment call from Health P.E.I. after graduating.
“What they have in common is the fact that all of the students in their cohort received reach-outs from their own prospective provinces. They received phone calls, they were asked to go out for coffee … those little things,” Bernard said.
“We heard today in [the committee meeting] that we can’t do it, so I’m not sure what the difference is.”
Green Party MLA Karla Bernard says she’s spoken with medical students who had hopes of practising in P.E.I. who went to another province that reached out to them with desirable offers. (Legislative Assembly of P.E.I.)
The number of names on P.E.I.’s patient registry, the list of Islanders waiting to be assigned to a primary care provider, has dropped by 5,100 since January 2025 — but that still leaves 31,707 patients waiting to be affiliated with a family doctor or nurse practitioner.
Kloschinsky told the committee this week that if recruiters haven’t tried to entice some medical students back to P.E.I., it’s because they weren’t aware of them.
She said privacy laws prevent medical schools from sending out a list of students or where they’re from, but Health P.E.I. does try to keep track of them through avenues such as social media.
The health authority also attends social gatherings throughout the year, Kloschinsky said, while Island recruiters make visits to medical schools.
Over the summer, Health P.E.I. also established a website where medical students and residents can voluntarily provide their contact information.
“What we do is try to engage in every which way,” Kloschinsky told the committee.
“We rely on word of mouth a lot and, I won’t lie, when the admissions letters go out from across Canada, we … literally search through Facebook to be, like, ‘Whose niece got in and how we can connect them?'”
WATCH | What does it take to convince a health-care professional to move to P.E.I.?:
What does it take to convince a health-care professional to move to P.E.I.?
Health P.E.I. says it has improved the way it recruits doctors and other health-care professionals to come and work in this province. CBC News: Compass host Louise Martin sat down with the agency’s director of workforce recruitment, Dominick Desjardins, to find out what goes into enticing people to the Island.
But Bernard said the province is “clearly not doing something right,” given recruitment efforts have been strained for so long.
She said she’s spoken with people who had hopes of practising in P.E.I. who went to another province that reached out to them with desirable offers.
“I’m still hearing the same stories of med students not being reached out to by the [P.E.I.] government while all the other provinces are,” she said.
“It took them away to another province, and so I absolutely think that there is … not only a missed opportunity, it’s almost negligent the fact that we are not doing what other provinces are doing.”