Helping new doctors with English

West Kildonan

Retired Winnipeg doctor Jeff Sisler is always genuinely heartened by the reaction he gets when he lets others know what he is up to.

Sisler, a family doctor for 35 years in a variety of roles, including with CancerCare Manitoba, the University of Manitoba’s department of family medicine and the College of Family Physicians of Canada, is a volunteer with Health English Language Pro (HELP), a program that connects Canadian physicians with newcomer, internationally trained doctors.

“People are impressed and pleased that this kind of thing goes on, and I think the general public knows there a lot of need in Canada for more health professionals and there are a lot of internationally trained people who are fighting hard to get into practice,” said Sisler, who was always heavily involved in teaching clinics and providing professional learning environments in family medicine before hanging up his stethoscope for good in 2022.

“Helping that happen is a good thing to be involved in.”

The HELP program is administered by ACCES Employment, a Canadian non-for-profit organization which provides services to people facing barriers to employment. It links employers to skilled people and builds networks in collaboration with community partners.

HELP sprang from a desire to extend mentoring type opportunities to health-care professionals, particularly doctors, that existed for other professional groups in ACCES programming. Communication and language would be a central focus.

The goal was also to create a safe, collaborative space where two fully engaged medical professionals with shared expertise could sit down together, create a relationship, talk about medicine and particularly about practicing medicine in Canada – and the cultural nuances embedded in everyday interactions.

“There are a lot of newcomer physicians in Canada that were trained in English and whose medical English and conversational English is often pretty strong,” Sisler said. “For them the challenges are, less about how to pronounce ‘hemoglobin’ and more about what are the workplace dynamics in Canadian hospitals between doctors and nurses, and how active patients are in the caregiving process.”

A typical HELP partnership consists of 12 one-hour meetings, once a week. They can be in-person or done virtually. Volunteer doctors are supported by a library of modules and case studies covering issues relating to understanding patient care in Canada and the Canadian medical system. Topics include navigating hierarchy, patient-centred care and communicating about palliative care. All can be different from culture to culture.

Sisler finds that it is important to follow the needs of the participants as well, because they differ from one to the next. The last person he met with was a young woman who had moved recently from western Ukraine.

“She said I was the only person that she spoke English with regularly, for this one hour a week with me,” he recalled. “She’s in a large supportive Ukrainian community and trying to figure out whether she is going to try and requalify as a doctor or do something different in health care or in something else.”

The program has been well received. About 90 per cent of the doctors volunteering to partner with internationally trained, newcomer physicians say they will do it again. ACCES Employment recently received funding from the CMA Foundation, a private foundation connected to the Canadian Medical Association, to the tune of $645,000 over the next three years.

Sisler intends to continue to be a part of HELP.

“It’s really struck me how this program, for a couple of months at least, puts you in regular contact with someone who is in a very remarkable phase in their life, trying to make things happen in a new country. You feel like you are a little part of their story.”