18 doctors recruited for health region

The NDP government announced Thursday that 18 new doctors have been recruited for Prairie Mountain Health since 2024 — but Doctors Manitoba says the focus should be on retaining doctors in rural areas.

Premier Wab Kinew and Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara were in Brandon to announce 137 new physicians have been recruited during the last two years through the provincial Health Care Retention and Recruitment Office.

The 18 new physicians practising in PMH are a mix of emergency and family doctors, Asagwara told reporters during a media event at the Brandon Regional Health Centre.

“We’ve made a point for the retention and recruitment office to really laser focus on the areas where we know there is a great need, and the ER was one of them,” Asagwara said.

A spokesperson from Doctors Manitoba said in a written statement to the Sun that rural communities are still seeing shortages.

“We do not want Manitoba to be a revolving door for doctors,” the statement said.

In mid-September, Doctors Manitoba published an annual report which said the province added a record number of physicians, and the reported regions “all saw increases last year except for Western Manitoba, which lost eight physicians — a decrease of 3 per cent.”

While recruitment is important, “equally strong retention is what will sustain our progress,” Doctors Manitoba said in January.

Asagwara said PMH and Northern Regional Health Authority have “some of our greatest staffing challenges,” but work to retain doctors is still ongoing.

The provincial government created the retention and recruitment office in the 2024 budget. In this year’s budget, the NDP pledged $2.4 million to recruit physicians in rural and northern communities.

“We restored the fund … of over $2.4 million specifically for the retention and recruitment of doctors in rural communities,” Asagwara said.

“That’s money that’s spent making sure that if there’s a specific ask that doctors might have … those funds are there to help them with that.”

The funds are used to add additional staff, incentivize international doctors to work in rural areas and modernize health-care technology.

“All of these things are about retention, and all of these things are what doctors have been asking for, for many years,” Asagwara said.

However, Doctors Manitoba questioned the provincial retention efforts.

“Doctors Manitoba works closely with the Health Care Retention and Recruitment Office to support its recruitment efforts, but we have yet to see a plan for retention, the first R in its name,” the group’s statement said.

During Thursday’s announcement, Kinew acknowledged that there is still “more work to do” but “the point that we’re making today is that things are getting better, improvements are happening, investments are bringing people to Manitoba.”

When asked about gaps and challenges in rural care, PMH chief executive officer Treena Slate said, “I see more opportunities than challenges.”

“We know if we can train locally, we can recruit and retain locally,” Slate said.

“There’s always challenges, of course, but there’s many opportunities, right? And I think that’s what we need to maximize on if we’re going to succeed,” she said.

Slate said “at least” six more specialists will begin practising in PMH within the next six months.

Of the 137 recruits provincewide, 81 practise family medicine. Others specialize in emergency medicine, surgery, psychiatry, internal medicine and pediatrics, for example.

The province said 52 came from the United Kingdom and 42 were recruited from elsewhere in Canada.

One recruit, Dr. Arleigh Trainor, started in the emergency department at the Brandon hospital seven months ago.

She grew up in Thompson and moved to the U.S. after marrying an American.

“For me, it is truly a homecoming,” she said, adding she had stopped at a Manitoba recruiting table in Montreal and began asking about coming home. “The office we have spoken of has made that very easy.”

The government said Manitoba has added 370 net new doctors since October 2023, when the NDP took power, bringing the provincial total to more than 3,700 physicians, the highest on record.

Last month, the annual report from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba recorded a net gain of 196 physicians in 2025-26, the largest annual increase on record, bringing the total to 3,694 as of April 30. It marked the third consecutive year of growth, following gains of 164 and 133 doctors in the previous two fiscal years.

» rgerrard@brandonsun.com, with files from the Winnipeg Free Press