Owen Sound (Rural)

Program Highlights

The Owen Sound Family Medicine Residency Program is designed to provide residents with a comprehensive and diverse medical education in a rural setting. Highlights of the program include:

• Broad Scope Practice
  • Family physicians in Owen Sound provide a wide range of services, including inpatient care, emergency medicine, newborn care, palliative care, and care of the elderly.
• Allied Health Collaboration
  • Residents will work closely with allied health professionals such as pharmacists, nurse practitioners, diabetes educators, and social workers.
• Specialty Exposure
  • The program offers opportunities to explore areas of interest such as maternity care, nursing home care, addictions medicine, emergency medicine, and anesthesia.
  • Residents will work closely with specialists in internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, general surgery, orthopedic surgery, urological surgery, and ENT surgery in a supportive and collaborative environment.
• Rural Medicine with access to a well-established referral centre 
  • Brightshores Health Systems serves a catchment area of 160,000 people, providing residents with the volume and acuity of a larger centre while maintaining the rural lifestyle. The facility is equipped with advanced diagnostic tools like MRI and CT scanners.
• Individualized Attention
  • Family Medicine residents are the only full-time residents at the referral centre  ensuring a 1:1 preceptor ratio and priority access to procedures, interesting cases, and additional learning opportunities.

Academic sessions for Owen Sound residents are held in Owen Sound, with family medicine preceptors located in Owen Sound, Wiarton, or Southampton/Port Elgin for core rotations. Block rotations primarily take place at the Brightshores Owen Sound site.

Resident Perspective

• Education-based learning – while staff are genuinely excited to have learners around, they do not rely on us to keep things running. Therefore every experience is based around your learning. You will do very little ‘scut’ work.
• Home call – you may be on call more days than your urban counter-parts but typically you are less busy, and this allows you to get enough volume and is more representative of how you will practice as a rural physician when you finish
• Flexible schedules – you choose your own shifts in ER and you choose your own call shifts on internal medicine and surgery
• Local rotations in R1 year – since Owen Sound is a regional hospital, it has enough volume for all core rotations to be completed on site!
• Mandatory block of general surgery in second year – this is unique to Owen Sound. Because of this block, you only have 8 weeks of elective time in second year instead of 12 like other residents in the program.
• Longitudinal ER experience – you do a half day of ER while on FM rotations. This allows for great continuity of learning
• Rural lifestyle – Owen Sound is located on Georgian Bay, at the base of the beautiful Bruce Peninsula with endless recreation opportunities such as: sailing, kayaking, kite boarding, rock climbing, camping, skiing, hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, hiking, hockey, dragon boating, rowing, and multiple festivals and cultural events