John and Janette Smith were so fed up with trying to find a doctor in St. Albert they started travelling to Spruce Grove instead.
The St. Albert residents aren't alone. The Spruce Grove clinic they attend, Parkland Medical Associates, has seen a four-fold increase in the number of visits and new families coming from St. Albert in the last four years.
"I find it depressing, day after day, week after week not being able to find a doctor in St. Albert," said Janette, 72.
The Smiths' doctor in St. Albert retired last summer and they've been struggling ever since to find a new one. Many St. Albert clinics are in the same boat, struggling to recruit new doctors to replace retirees.
Spruce Grove's Parkland clinic, on the other hand, has been able to grow its roster of doctors from nine to 16 in the last four years, said medical director Dr. Shawkat Kibria.
The key has been a multi-faceted recruitment approach that allows flexible hours and patient loads, Kibria said. The clinic even pays $1,000 headhunting bonuses to its doctors who land new recruits.
But the biggest lure for new doctors is a supportive working environment that includes a complex full of medical specialists and services under one roof, Kibria said.
"It's never about incentives," Kibria said. "It's more about the work environment, the people that they're going to be interacting with. That's what's made the difference for us."
Kibria works in a gleaming silver glass structure that opened in 2007 in central Spruce Grove. He is one of a group of 10 doctors who got together and built the $25-million facility, which they envisioned as a "Mayo Clinic type" complex with everything in it.
Among the building's tenants are lab and X-ray services, a foot clinic, physiotherapy, a provincial public health clinic, the University of Alberta's family medicine training centre and a Rexall drug store.
The building also has the four most commonly sought medical specialists: women's health, chronic pain-arthritis, internal medicine and cardiac-pulmonary.
The medical services in the facility provide doctors with a support network that helps attract new recruits, Kibria said.
Spruce Grove's Mayor Stuart Houston agrees.
"That medical centre has been a real boost for the city and it's allowed more doctors to work in the city and kept pace with our growth," Houston said.
MLA Doug Horner said Spruce Grove has grown rapidly in recent years, drawing many young families and the doctors who want to serve them.
"Doctors go where the market is too," Horner said.
What about St. Albert?
Politicians in St. Albert routinely hear from constituents about the shortage of family doctors, which the Alberta Medical Association estimates at 1,500 province-wide.
"We are hearing it more and more often as a concern and I'm concerned about it," said Mayor Nolan Crouse.
He doesn't think St. Albert has to do what some smaller towns have done and offer direct incentives to lure doctors, but the city does need to communicate to doctors and their families that St. Albert is a good place to live and do business, and make them feel welcome, Crouse said.
"We have to find a way to recruit a clinic or a group of doctors here without throwing money at it," Crouse said.
What attracts doctors to a community is not necessarily a building but the community itself and what their family is going to get out of it, said Wendy Morison of Liberton Medical Clinic.
On that basis, St. Albert should rank well, she said, but her clinic has trouble finding doctors willing to provide specialized services and work their hours.
"Doctors just want to work in medi-centres," Morison said. "We've tried to woo in some cosmetic doctors and they just don't want to work as hard as we do."
The Grandin Medical Clinic finds recruiting a challenge because it offers comprehensive family care, which is a challenging area of practice, said Dr. Darryl LaBuick.
Overall, he believes that clinics and communities should be able to recruit on their own merits without getting into financial incentives.
"You're not selling a car," he said. "You're selling a career."
The local primary care network, which provides medical professionals like nurses to participating doctors, has met with local politicians to see if they can all help promote the area to potential doctors.
The network did research that suggests roughly 17 per cent of St. Albert doctors will be retiring by 2012.
"There is a small pool to pick from and that pool isn't going to be getting any bigger," said assistant manager Sheila Cousineau.
