Rural P.E.I. community gets a doctor again after 5-year lobbying effort

Residents of a central P.E.I. community are getting a new doctor this year, and it's all thanks to a group of advocates who came together to fight for rural health care. 

Health P.E.I. confirms a new family doctor will be starting a practice in July out of the South Shore Health and Wellness Clinic in Crapaud.

Dr. Meghan Cameron will work there four days per week, and spend one day per week on Lennox Island.

"It's been really wonderful for the community," said Matt MacFarlane, the former co-chair of the advocacy group formed by community members.

"We've been working on getting a doctor to Crapaud specifically to service the patients in the South Shore area for over five years now and it's been a lot of work, a lot of hard work, a lot of effort, a lot of lobbying with the government, a lot of advocacy work."

The region hasn't had a doctor of its own since 2018, when a physician relocated just a year after a long-time doctor in the region closed his practice after 30 years.

"When he left, it was the first time in about 100 years that Crapaud didn't have a family physician working in Crapaud," MacFarlane said of the second doctor.

And that's when the community took action.

They formed a non-profit, Shore Health and Wellness Inc. They raised money to build a clinic in the South Shore Pharmacy. And they pulled the money together to buy equipment — all before they'd found anyone to practise there.

MacFarlane believes those efforts, along with hard work and persistence, were key to finally bringing a doctor back to Crapaud.

"The model of, you know, 'If you build it, they will come' also factored in a bit too," he said.

"Because if we didn't have this clinic out there as infrastructure to turn to, to work in, we would really be behind the game in being able to actually attract anyone to the community."

He said the community made a concerted decision not to let an adversarial or aggressive relationship develop with Health P.E.I. or the provincial government.

"We understand the situation with health care in this province, we understand that there's a shortage of nurses and doctors provincewide — countrywide — and we thought we would just stay the course with our approach," he said.