BC Rural Health Awards

RCCbc awarded another impressive cohort of recipients with a BC Rural Health Award for their outstanding work in rural healthcare in Spring 2020. Unfortunately, it was not possible to present the awards at RCCbc’s BC Rural Health Conference because it was cancelled due to COVID-19. 

The Terrace Women’s Wellness Group received the Team-based Rural Maternity Care Award. The Group, comprised of obstetricians/gynecologists, Drs. Dawid Janse van Rensburg and Kirsti Ziola, family doctors, Drs. Carla Gemeinhardt, Amy Passmore, and Jacobus Strydom, and registered midwife, Bethany Nash, provide support for—and have greatly improved—women’s reproductive health in BC’s Pacific Northwest.  

Meanwhile, three recipients, who have provided many years of longitudinal care in their communities and are greatly respected for their medical and community work, received the Award of Excellence in Rural Medicine–Lifetime Achievement:  

• Dr. Mike Kenyon is an internal medicine specialist with a strong grounding in emergency medicine and more than 40 years of clinical medicine practice. He received his medical training at the University of Witwatersrand and began serving as a specialist early in his career in Soweto, Johannesburg. He joined the South African Army Medical Corps and continued providing military medical services when he immigrated to Canada, serving in mobile medical units and at the main intensive care unit in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Dr. Kenyon is the current head of the intensive care unit at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital, and also serves two weeks per month at Mills Memorial Hospital in Terrace. He is an accomplished preceptor who dedicates time to training University of British Columbia (UBC) Fellows for rural and community care, and general internal medicine. Dr. Kenyon is a member of “Waap Lagaax Gisbutwada” (part of the Tsimshian First Nation) and carries the name, “Halaaytm Lax G’eelm”. He is an avid fly fisher. 

• Dr. Tracy Morton grew up in small town Alberta and was surprised to find himself in an even smaller town in rural BC: Queen Charlotte City. Working on Haida Gwaii since 2000, he has found great community and fantastically stimulating remote medicine, working with a committed group of colleagues. He believes that healthcare in a rural environment can be as good as anywhere in Canada. He models healthy work–home life balance through biking, meditation and yoga, travel, and cultivating healthy relationships. He is married to Kiki and has two boys, Lief and Sol, who teach him humility and wonder everyday. He lives on a small island and mostly appreciates the canoe commute to work. 

• Dr. Bruce Nicolson is a UBC graduate who traveled to New Zealand and Australia to train and learn additional surgical and anesthetic enhanced skills before returning to locum for six months in 100 Mile House in 1978. Since then, he has continually practiced in the community (with sabbaticals in 1984 and 1993 to engage in more enhanced skills training), providing both office-based services, as well as emergency department coverage, including emergent care, surgery, anesthesia, and obstetrics. Dr. Nicolson has had occasion to deliver two generations of some families in 100 Mile House. Throughout his 41–year medical career, Dr. Nicolson has taken a keen interest in improving outcomes for patients and providers, alike. He travels regularly to White Feather clinic at the Canim Lake Reserve to provide closer-to-home healthcare for this remote population, and advocates aggressively for improved working conditions for rural physicians. Dr. Nicolson was one of the first providers to successfully negotiate a contract for a nurse practitioner within a physician-run, fee-for-service medical clinic. Additionally, he has participated on several local hospital committees, and served multiple terms as Chief of Staff. He is one of the founding members of the Central Interior Rural Division of Family Practice and helped lead the local deployment of “A GP for Me,” an initiative to attach patients without a family physician to a local primary care provider.  

The BC Rural Health Awards team worked diligently this past year to amplify awareness and impact of the Awards was in local communities. They placed articles in rural newspapers, which described the high level of commitment and medical care provided by the award recipients. At a time when many communities are struggling to retain their medical services, these articles provided some good news stories about healthcare in rural BC, along with potential ideas for other communities to implement.  

Going forward, the BC Rural Health Awards team will strive to gain wider recognition for the Awards and their recipients. Post-pandemic, the return of in-person events, such as the BC Rural Health Conference, where the awards are normally presented, will provide an ideal way to spread the word.