Heather Wright/The Independent

Bluewater Health and the Ontario Health Team in Sarnia-Lambton will be in charge of recruiting new doctors in all of Lambton County.

That’s according to Rosanne Orcutt, a long-time Petrolia health care advocate and the now former head of the Central Lambton Recruitment Committee.

Bluewater Health had always recruited for specialists in the hospital. The Blue Coast Primary Care Recruitment & Retention group was tasked with finding family doctors in the Sarnia area. The Central Lambton group mainly recruited family physicians to the Petrolia area.

In August 2024, the Sarnia group closed down citing a lack of funds. Orcutt says the organization’s costs were high because it
used full-time staff instead of volunteers.

Bluewater Health and the Ontario Health Team took over the recruitment of family doctors with the committee’s collapse, going to Sarnia council looking for cash to continue the efforts.

Now, the Central Lambton Recruitment Team is shutting down at the end of June.

“With the amalgamation of the CEEH Foundation and the Bluewater Health Foundation in Sarnia, the financial incentives provided by the CEEH Foundation to new doctors signing with the Central Lambton Family Health Team and covering shifts in the emergency department will no longer be available,” Orcutt wrote in a letter to Petrolia council. “Incentives, if any, will be
decided by the Recruitment Committee in Sarnia.”

“Every doctor coming to Lambton County now – every family physician – will be treated the same,” Orcutt tells The Independent.

“We had some very lucrative incentives provided by our foundation for family doctors coming to Central Lambton and Sarnia didn’t have those incentives – a lot of other places didn’t. But once the the foundations amalgamated, then those incentives were also gone.”

Orcutt says the local health team will still have some say in recruitment. Since residents from Western University practice family medicine in Petrolia, doctors at the Central Lambton Family Health Team will still be able to offer selected doctors positions at the end of their residency, Orcutt says.

That residency program and the generous incentives were, according to Orcutt, the big reasons Petrolia was able to attract so many new doctors over the last decade.

“Most of those residents wanted to stay, so recruitment was not difficult, and then the second thing was because of the very lucrative incentives from the foundation, we stood way above anybody else’s incentives.”

Orcutt is hopeful the new arrangement work well. She says the people running the recruitment department “have respect for the rural community, and I think they will do a good job for us.”

There will also be a recruitment committee which will have rural representation.