Ingrid Clark, Town & Country Ontario
In Huron East-Seaforth, community leaders have developed innovative strategies to attract healthcare professionals with the development of the program Skills for Healthcare Attraction and Retention know as Health Kick Huron.

Laura Overholt, Project Manager - Health Kick Huron
Health Kick Huron is a project that has been established to address the shortfall in health care recruitment, of health care professionals, to our Huron County area.

Paul Nichol, Manager Huron Business Development Corp.
There's a couple of underlying philosophies behind this. One is that, across Canada, the recruitment of healthcare professionals is a serious issue. For rural areas in particular it's even harder, because as we know most of the graduates are going to urban centres.

Ingrid Clark
The project was launched with joint funding from the Huron East/Seaforth Community Trust, the Huron Business Development Corporation and from the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. Health Kick Huron has three main components: Youth Engagement - helping youth explore the opportunities that are available in Health Care; Skill Development of workers already in the Health Care sector; and, the recruitment of physicians and other health care professionals.

Gwen Devereaux, Physician Recruitment Officer, Huron-Perth
Each year in recruitment we hold our own weekend, and we invite candidates from the 5 medical schools here in Ontario, for a weekend where they can be welcomed and meet with the physicians that live in this area and work in this area. And we have recruitment teams set up in each community and I work with all of them. We advertise regularly, we do site visits where we have physicians come in and I go to the communities where they live in and work with them.

Paul Nichol
We've worked very closely with Georgian College to offer a Registered Practical Nurse Training program in the area. And that allows us to take people that are currently in the sector, like personal support workers for example and upgrade their skills.

Barb Carrier, Program Mgr. Part Time Studies, Georgian College - Owen Sound Campus
It's a practical nursing program, part time. The students are in class 8 hours a week. It will take them 4 years to finish this program, and at the end they will be able to write their registration exam as a practical nurse.

Everything I hear from the community, both the students and the others we're involved with is very, very positive. They're happy that its here, in a rural area. They don't have to travel far. It's being delivered close to home and it's manageable because it's not full time where you'd have to leave your employment and not have a pay cheque. This way they can maintain their jobs and their homes and the contact with their family.

Tanya
It was important for me to take it in my home town because I work full time, have a house and two kids and I'm a single mother and couldn't go away to school full time, there'd be no way.

Lynn Hildabrant, Nursing Student
Several years ago, 26 to be exact, I was enrolled at a nursing in school in London and I was unable to attend at the time. So it's always been a dream in the back of my head and when it was offered here in Huron County I jumped at the chance to come and become a nurse.

Enrica
Well the program was invented to have local nurses by offering it locally they are hoping that people will stay in this area. And there is a real shortage of nurses in this area. So by being a part of this program, and by becoming a nurse, I hopefully could help out our local community by providing the nursing knowledge later on in life.

Tanya
Just was hired three weeks ago at a job that I probably wouldn't have been able to be offered if it wasn't for my enrolment in this program. Just offered a new job at a doctor's office. Its right in my home town, I can walk to work. Its 9 to 5 and its all because of this program.

Ingrid Clark
University graduate Sarah Agar received a summer placement in a local pharmacy to better understand that career option.

Sarah Agar, Pharmacy Intern
It was a great experience because I was interested in healthcare. Having finished my undergraduate degree I wanted to explore some career option, so when this opportunity came up in Huron County I was pretty excited because of the opportunity to live at home and save money to save up for the part of my education.

Sarah Agar
When I was at the pharmacy I was introduced to all the aspect that a pharmacist does because that was the career I was interested in doing. So my pharmacist was really great for allowing me to interact with customers and really immerse myself in understanding what a pharmacist does.

Laura Overholt
There's a few things that we've done. One is a youth Med-Quest camp with was put on in July of this year and we worked with the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry out of the University of Western Ontario to put the camp on. And it allowed 25 students from Huron and Perth to basically engage in a number of hands types of activities and explore medicine and health care related careers. And it was a wonderful success.

Gwen Devereaux
Healthkick Huron is probably one of the most innovative strategies that we have happening in Ontario. This is a project that we will reap the benefits of for years to come, particularly in areas around our youth and motivating our youth to enter healthcare.

Ingrid Clark
Youth Engagement, Skills Upgrading, Professional Recruitment outside the box. Health Kick Huron. An innovative piece of the puzzle to help encourage the recruitment of health care professional to rural areas. Perhaps as the news of the success in Huron spreads, other rural communities will take up the challenge and adopt Huron's ideas to their own needs.