New doctor needs office, so New Brunswick mayor moves

Bas-Caraquet is a small community on the Acadian Peninsula. There was no office space available for the new doctor so the mayor offered his own place to the physician.

Northeastern New Brunswick is in dire need of physicians. Mayor Agnes Doiron heads up two groups dedicated to bringing more doctors to the Acadian Peninsula. Dorion heard the medical clinic next to her office needed space so a new doctor it had recruited could move to the village of roughly 1,400 people; she was quick to find a solution. "We can't say no to another doctor, and the only space we had was my office, so I said, 'Take my office,'" Doiron said. The physician will arrive in August. A 24-hour service that was cut in 2005 from the nearby Hôpital de l'Enfant Jésus in Caraquet and as the Mayor sees recruiting more doctors to the region as a way to encourage the service to reopen. "We need doctors to have service in our hospital. So it's for the safety of all the people here. So it's better to have another doctor than an office, so that's why," she said. Doiron has use of a temporary space while she looks for something permanent. Dr. Gilbert Blanchard, who runs the medical clinic that is taking over the office, is thankful that the mayor agreed to offer her office to allow the new doctor to join the local ranks. "In the Acadian Peninsula we're quite missing doctors and every day we see 10, 20 patients in [the emergency room] that don't have a family physician. So that's why I'm quite happy with that because I could recruit a new physician," Blancard said. The new physician will help reduce the list of people who do not have a family doctor by taking on between 500 and 1,000 patients.