THUNDER BAY —Members of the Ontario Medical Students Association council know the health care crisis in the north, so the council came to Thunder Bay to see it first hand, and aim for change.
The Ontario Medical Students Association is the voice of the over 3,500 medical students across the province, and it was the first time having a council meeting in Thunder Bay.
The association is “trying to develop an annual event where students can come in and learn more about Thunder Bay, learn about the health disparities and learn what exactly can we do to help uplift this community and to help improve the situation that's here,” said Maxim Matyashin, president of the Ontario Medical Students Association.
“We know there's a health care crisis and we know that the community that is most impacted is here in Northern Ontario.”
The majority of the council come from large urban centres, like Toronto, Ottawa and London, he said.
“How can we represent Ontario medical students if we don't understand where they live with the conditions they live in, the health care disparities that they face. We don't see the communities that they're a part of.
“This initiative is an attempt to bridge that gap,” Matyashin said.
The council is comprised of about 20 students from all six Ontario medical schools.
“Our entire goal here is to learn more, to educate ourselves.
“We have seats at the table and it has been very sad and unfortunate that the people that have seats at the table do not come from Northern Ontario. They do not understand the disparity that the population here faces. I think as medical students, as future health care practitioners, our role, our goal and our responsibility is . . . to put ourselves into other people's shoes,” Matyashin said.
Savanah Tillberg, VP of equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization on the Ontario Medical Student Association council, is from Thunder Bay and helped to organize the spring meeting.
She said two out of seven executives are from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, which is the most amount of Northern representation that the organization has had in its 51 years of existence.
“Historically, the council has been made up of students from the southern representing schools, surely because most of those meetings, most of those elections happen in the south, typically in Toronto.
“There is a barrier for students coming from Thunder Bay and Sudbury to attend those meetings due to cost and time required off of programs for additional travel time,” she said.
The terms that medical students are elected into are one year in length.
“It feels really good to know that in that year we've been able to make longitudinal change beyond my term.
“Come June 1, a new fantastic medical student is going to enter my position. It's a really good feeling to know that in addition to all the wonderful things that they're going to complete, there's a little bit of what we've worked towards that's going to live on and that more and more medical students every year are going to get the opportunity to come to the North to learn about health disparities here to just see it.”
On Sunday, the entire council will visit Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre.
“Seeing that it is the tertiary care centre for this entire area of the region, I thought it was important to show these medical students what we have, what we're working with, the beautiful facility.
“The EDI team from the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre that is led by Dr. Miranda Lesperance, is coming to do a presentation with us about equity in health care and they're going to take our team through a smudging ceremony to learn more about equity in health care as well as culturally competent care and how that's provided here in the north and how that might differ from southern centres,” Tillberg said.
Pallavi Dutta, VP of education on the Ontario Medical Student Association council, said the biggest thing from an education perspective has been a lack of access to education opportunities with the bottom-line being funding.
“There are funding discrepancies within being able to access rural medical education and that's something that we've actively been advocating for. We're working not only with the different deans of universities sitting on committees . . . but also working with the Ministry of Health itself to try to increase this funding that we see not exist for rural communities,” she said.
Harrison Gao, VP of advocacy on the Ontario Medical Student Association council, said it was his first time in Thunder Bay.
“Just being able to speak with some of the locals about the city and what it's like living in Northern Ontario, we've been able to learn a lot from this experience,” he said.
“With the work that we've been doing with the Ministry of Health, we've been successful in increasing the grants that are available to medical students in southern Ontario so that they're able to do electives in the north and get some funding to cover accommodations, flights and get that medical training here too,” he said.
This spring meeting was supported by the CEDC Tourism Development Fund. Their sponsorship and support have allowed council to take the first steps in engaging with Northern Ontario and furthering advocacy efforts.
