U.K. docs make new home in Killarney

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/10/2024 (572 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

KILLARNEY — It took more than a year, but Dr. Jim Heptinstall, his wife and their five children are now settled in Killarney, after he signed with an international recruiter and the family moved from the United Kingdom to Canada.

Heptinstall is one of two family physicians from the U.K. who recently moved to the community after being head-hunted by Waterford Global, a Winnipeg-based recruiting firm hired by the Town of Killarney to find doctors.

“We first started this journey over a year ago when we met with Waterford Global, and we came to visit Killarney … during the first week of October,” Heptinstall said. He has been seeing patients at the Tri-Lake Health Centre since early September and said his family is settling in “really well.”

“Our oldest is about to turn 15 and our youngest just turned six. We involved them in the decision-making, and they were really excited about it,” Heptinstall said.

Heptinstall stood alongside Dr. Dominic Hennessy – also from the U.K. — at a recent fundraising event in Killarney to raise money for STARS Air Ambulance and for the purchase of a transport ventilator for the hospital.

Heptinstall is from Nottingham, which is about three hours north of London. Hennessy is originally from Yorkshire, about two hours north of Nottingham, but for the last 13 years he practised in a small town called Bournemouth on the southeast coast of the U.K.

Before moving to Killarney, Heptinstall and Hennessy had site visits throughout the Killarney-Turtle Mountain area last fall and accepted their positions within a few months of each other.

Hennessy and his partner have two dogs, retired greyhounds. And other than a “stressful day loading the dogs at Heathrow Airport, flying them to Chicago and then driving north, it was a good journey,” he said.

“And then we took a trip up north that was really good fun, up to Flin Flon, to Snow Lake, and down to the New Iceland Museum in Gimli, so that was kind of cool,” Hennessy said. “It was a good long trip.”

Hennessy saw patients in Killarney in August, using his personal vacation to cover shifts as a locum, which he said helped him get acquainted with the area and the people.

There are many reasons Hennessy said he chose to move to Killarney — it made financial sense, he’s getting a bit older, he’ll be “50 next year” — and added he’s looking forward to mentoring and working with medical school students on work placement.

“I have an interest in education,” Hennessy said. “I was lecturing for Bournemouth and Winchester universities, and teaching for NHS England, teaching family physicians to become family physician trainers. So, I bring that along with me,” he said.

The National Health Service for England is one of four NHS systems for the U.K., providing free public health administered by the government.

Hennessy and Heptinstall come to Manitoba at a time when the province has the second-lowest number of physicians per capita in Canada, according to a survey by Doctors Manitoba, a non-partisan physicians’ advocacy group.

In April, Premier Wab Kinew and Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara announced a provincewide goal to hire 100 doctors in one year to address the doctor shortage in the province.

Heptinstall said when he read newspaper stories about new doctor hires, he remarked, “So, I guess I’m one of those.”

He added: “It’s nice to be appreciated and know that people want you to be here. And for me as a physician, you just put your head down and see the patients that are there in front of you.”

This year’s provincial budget referred to building a new annex at Brandon University that will eventually house a medical school in partnership with the University of Manitoba. The plan is to train 10 to 16 students per year in Brandon.

Hennessy said training students right out of school in smaller areas will help fix the rural physician shortage.

“If you already have a medical school with placements into rural communities and seeing how medicines practise differently there, that’s probably going to mean that more people might take an interest in rural medicine,” Hennessy said.

Killarney Mayor Janice Smith said even though it’s taken about a year for Waterford Global to find both physicians and then have Prairie Mountain Health offer them return-of-service agreements, she’s been recruiting doctors for the last eight years.

Smith was instrumental in hiring Waterford Global in 2016 to bring Dr. Mark Bemment from the U.K., who is still practising in the community.

“It’s surreal that everything is working out as well as can be expected,” said Smith, adding, “And we knew that it wasn’t going to happen overnight, that it would be a process.”

In 2023, PMH began offering a recruitment incentive to all new physician recruits to the health region but ended the program in June.

Smith said even without the incentive — which in 2016 was about $120,000 — the municipality will continue to pay a recruitment firm, since council has seen its success.

“I will say this over and over and over — it works because you are not placing, you are matching. You’re matching the community to the doctor and that’s what you want,” Smith said.

“We get that we can’t keep them here forever. We understand that people have lives, and no one would ever commit forever. But we want them to enjoy Killarney like we enjoy Killarney, and hopefully make it their home and make a career out of it.”

» mmcdougall@brandonsun.com

» X: @enviromichele