It was a teaching day at the St. Joseph Hospital yesterday with 40 Medical students from the U of S.

Greg Hoffart, Executive Director of the St Joseph's Hospital explains, "The Saskatchewan Medical Association has a program they offer where they bring medical students from various degrees of their education, out to four different sites per year in Saskatchewan. We have been fortunate that they have chosen Estevan as one of their stops this year."

"Yesterday morning they flew 40 medical students to Estevan and we greeted them at the Estevan Airport. We gave them a tour of St. Joseph Hospital with a few educational clinics put on by several of the physicians. We showed them about our community and ended with a banquet before they flew out of the Estevan Airport last night."

"The students are from various portions of their educational physician training, anywhere from second-year medical student to second-year resident. They are anywhere from ready to start their practice next year to five or six years down the road. It's a wide array of students and we're excited to have hosted them."
Hoffart adds, "We feel its a great opportunity to showcase what we have at our hospital and our community. Many of the students are from across the country training at the University Of Saskatchewan, many of them have never been to Estevan before. It's a pleasant surprise to many of them that we do in fact have detailed services that we provide at St. Joseph's Hospital and even in Estevan. It's good for them to see and perhaps help them choose Estevan as a future site for their practice."

 

Alexa Mcewen, a 1st-year student at the University Of Saskatchewan from Francis, Sk. She hasn't been to Estevan in a while but she was excited to see what had changed. Mcewen also really likes the city of Estevan and was excited to see the healthcare side of the city. 

"I'm in my first year of medicine. I decided to go into medicine because I have always liked the idea of helping people with what I do and health care always appealed to me. I started by going into nutrition and becoming a registered dietician and I really enjoyed that. I really love that background, but I found that my scope of being able to influence my patients' health was really limited." She added that she is studying medicine to help her patients better.

Mcewen shares "We are in Estevan because the Saskatchewan Medical Association does what they call roadmap tours. They Bring us out to rural communities in Saskatchewan, they do some northern but Estevan is one of the southern communities we've come to. They toured us around the healthcare facility and then around the town, so we get exposure to life in a small town and the services available. It's a good opportunity for a lot of my classmates who are not from Saskatchewan or who have grown up or spent most of their lives in a big city. It allows them to get exposure to an important aspect of Saskatchewan Healthcare since we are so rural."

The tour taught the students many things as well as tips for when they begin their practices.