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PRINCE GEORGE
Citizen
SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 1995
by GORDON HOEKSTRA Citizen Staff
Six years and two governments after the project was proposed, Prince George is finally getting a family residency practice program.
Starting July 1 and every year afterwards, six medical school students will complete their two-year family practice residencies in Prince George.
The government was expected to—make the" announcement Monday but has pushed back the date to later in the week.
The hope is that some of the doctors who train here will decide to stay in the community or in the North, said Prince George’s Dr. Galt Wilson, the interim site director of the program.
It takes 10 years of university to become a doctor, and by then “the big city is pretty seductive,” said Wilson. “If we yank them out for their final two years, we’ll have to see. But it can’t hurt.”
The residents, who will be selected from the 16 medical schools across Canada, will be given maximum exposure to the lifestyle advantages of living in the North, said Wilson.
Many doctors are close to 30 before they get a licence to practise and could be married with children and could find a smaller community attractive if exposed to it, added Wilson.
But wherever the graduates decide to go after their two-year stay in Prince, Wilson believes they’ll be better trained by being here.
In big, teaching hospitals, family doctors-in-the-making don’t get too much “meat and potatoes” on-hand training because there are so many specialists for referrals, said Wilson.
As well, larger communities are not ideal places for doctors to move out into the community and work, he said.
Prince George, on the other hand, is a good place to train family doctors because Prince George
Regional Hospital is busy, has relatively few specialists compared to big teaching hospitals and the city has flourishing family practices, he said.
In year one, the doctors-in-train-ing will spend most of their time in the hospital rotating through surgery, obstetrics and pediatrics. The second year will be spent largely on family practice in doctors’ offices in the community.
They will also be required to spend a month in a smaller, rural community in the North. ,
The government is encouraging a group of family doctors to get together under one roof permanently, where the rotating medical residents and doctors can co-operate and work together, said Wilson.
The city has had medical students before — one or two at a time — and Wilson believes the new program will enhance the quality of care patients receive in Prince George.
“Residents are energetic and highly motivated and right up to date on the latest developments,” said Wilson. “They are especially good on the social and psychological side of medicine. They’re trained to be holistic.”
The injection of the youthful doctors will also be beneficial to patients because it will give their doctors more time with patients, he said.
“I personally think that with all the struggle we’ve had here recently, the program will have a very positive influence on the hospital,” said Wilson.
“It’s very timely. We desperately need this kind of thing.”
And after 10 years of running the family practice residency program, the community will build up a core of 60 doctors who have worked in Prince George, added Wilson.
“We’re very excited. It’s a great antidote to all the strife and difficulty.”
INDEX
Ann Landers ..............6
Bridge..................30
Business.............16,17
City, B.C................3
Classified...........21-31
Comics .................14
Coming events ...........6
Commentary ..............5
Crossword ..............29
Entertainment ... .14,15
Horoscope...............30
Lifestyles...............6
Movies .................15
Sports................11-13
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Religion
Are you getting money's worth from down payment. Page 8
Language
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Nation
Turf war results in biker's bloody death in Acapulco. Page 18
Sports
New captain leads Cougars into critical series. Page 11
U.S. ENVIRONMENTALIST SAYS PROMISES BRO
NDP rapped for logging record
by MICHAEL SMYTH
VICTORIA (CP) — Prominent U.S. environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr. took some shots at B.C. logging policies Friday, suggesting the provincial NDP government hasn’t been living up to its promises.
Kennedy said last year’s high-profile agreement giving aboriginals a say in how rain-forest logging is managed in Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound, for
example, isn’t being fully respected by the government.
“It’s not being implemented fully on the ground,” said the son of the slain U.S. senator, who met earlier with Clayoquot native leaders.
“The lower-level administrators and bureaucracies have been consistently putting obstacles in the way of implementing that agreement.”
Kennedy, head of the Natural
Resources Defence Council in Washington, D.C., also took issue with the government’s claim that its new Forest Practices Code is the most progressive environmental law of its kind in North America.
Among other things, the code forces forestry companies to leave unlogged buffer zones around salmon-spawning streams.
“The code doesn’t give the protection to the strongest, most productive salmon streams that the
United States gives to its worst or least productive salmon streams,” Kennedy complained.
Environment Minister Sihota said after meeting with Kennedy there have been technical problems implementing the management agreement in Clayoquot, where 800 anti-logging demonstrators were arrested in the summer of
1992.
“If there are technical problems, we’ll work those out,” Sihota said.
But he took issue with Kennedy’s claim that the United States has tougher environmental laws than British Columbia.
“There’s no jurisdiction in North America that has brought forward legislation like we have to change the way we manage our forests,” Sihota said.”
Kennedy has been a constant and vocal critic of the province’s logging policies, provoking a running war of words with Premier
Mike Harcourt.
Harcourt earlier accused Kennedy of “spreading fiction” about the province’s environmental record in the United States, but Kennedy said his criticism has been fair and balanced.
“I’d say there’s a strong commitment by this government to a clean environment,” he said, adding he has not advocated a U.S. boycott of B.C. wood products as other activists have.
Students
planning
protest
by PAUL STRICKLAND Citizen Staff
College of New Caledonia students will demonstrate next Wednesday in protest against federal proposals that would raise tuition drastically for them, the CNC Board of Directors heard Friday.
The board voted to formally indicate its support for the CNC Student Association in its plans for the protest. Lana Coldwell, faculty representative on the board, said the CNC Faculty Association strongly supports the student demonstration.
Board members also decided a letter should be sent to federal Human Resources Minister Lloyd Axworthy’s opposing cuts to federal transfer payments to the provinces for post-secondary education. CNC president Terry Weninger said that letter will go out in the mail Monday.
“We realize the fiscal restraints the country is operating under, but we are also concerned that the federal government will effect measures that will negatively impact the ability of our country to train our workforce,” Weninger said.
In his white paper called Improving Social Security in Canada, Axworthy proposes that Ottawa stop putting money into universities and colleges and instead give provinces increased tax power to raise their own money, Weninger said.
Axworthy proposes to offset the anticipated tuition fee increases with $2 billion in student loans. Guy Caron, chairman of the Canadian Federation of Students, has said tuition fee increases resulting from Axworthy’s proposed changes would make higher education affordable only for the wealthy.
“We will be in total support of the protest,” Coldwell said at the end of the open session of Friday’s board meeting.
“We’re worried about the excessive burden resulting from student loans,” Weninger said in a press conference after the meeting. “We’re considering that in connection with the other pressures the students will have as adults in view of the state of our economy and anticipated heavier taxation for paying off the national debt when they’re out of school.
“We think that will have a detrimental effect on the number of training and education opportunities available, and that would further harm our economy by not preparing for the future,” he explained. "We’re asking the government to look at training and education as an investment, not just as an expenditure for cutbacks.”
MDs in training coming to city
UNBC student Kaz Ikuta had more on his mind than studies this week. His family lives in a suburb of Kobe, which was devastated by an earthquake.
Earthquake in Japan worries residents here
by BILL SEYMOUR Citizen Staff
When the first rumblings of the earthquake rippled through Kaz Ikuta’s parents home near Kobe, Japan, Kaz’s mother moved closer to her husband.
Seconds later a stereo sitting on a nearby shelf toppled over and fell on her empty bed space.
It was a close call, but aside from a few broken dishes and some missing utilities, Kaz says his parents escaped unharmed.
The University of Northern B.C. student says he has called his family twice since first learning of the quake. Some aftershocks have hit but his parents are OK.
“I guess they are fine,” Ikuta said Friday. “But they have to line up for groceries and they want their
water back.”
Ikuta is among a handful of Prince George residents with friends and family near the devastated city of Kobe. A candlelight vigil is being organized here for Friday in support of those who have suffered from the quake’s damage.
Ikuta’s parents live in the Kobe suburb of Akashi. Most of the damage to the area was within Kobe itself.
Ikuta said he’s grateful the quake didn’t happen any later in the morning than it did. Expressways, roads and railroad tracks were destroyed when shock waves rolled through the city around 5 a.m.
Any later and his father may have been en route to work at the
Asics running shoe company in Kobe. No one has been back to work since the quake, added Ikuta.
Earthquakes are part of life in Japan, says the 22-year-old outdoor recreation student who has experienced quakes with a magnitude of 3 on the Richter scale. But Tuesday’s plus-7 quake was far more than people were experienced with.
“People didn’t expect a huge quake,” he said. “It was scary.”
Friday’s vigil will take place at city hall beginning around 6 p.m.
People attending the vigil are asked to gather outside Other Art Cafe in preparation for moving across the street to city hall.
For more information on the vigil, call 563-6369 or 964-7826.
058307001008