Chris Le likes to blog about hiking, singing and, sometimes, suturing up patients.
Le, a third-year medical student at the University of Alberta, spent the last nine months in Hinton completing the Rural Integrated Community Clerkship (ICC) program. He documented his time in the town and the program on a detailed blog.
"For me, blogging is a time to reflect," says Le. "It's nice to have to look back on and help me remember what I enjoyed about my experiences."
The ICC is one of two clerkship options available for medical students at the U of A and is offered in various communities across the northern part of the province. Clerkship is the hands-on training that students complete during their latter years of medical school. The ICC program specifically teaches them about the practice of rural family medicine under the supervision of a physician.
Le was looking forward to living in Hinton, located about three hours away from his home in Edmonton, but admits he was nervous moving to a small town he had never been to before.
"Hinton is a terrific learning site," says Le, 26. "It draws a lot people from surrounding areas and has a lot of good medical resources, but I wasn't sure what it would be like to live in a small community."
But completing a clerkship in a rural setting has its perks. Le was able to scrub in on surgeries and perform procedures such as stitching up incisions and administering epidurals that would not otherwise be available to third-year medical students.
"I get to try procedures right now," says Le. "I'm seen as a junior colleague of the health-care team in Hinton…not just a student."
With the ICC program, students get to experience the breadth of rural medicine as they spend time with physicians everywhere from the emergency department to the operating room and long term care facilities. Continuity of care, which can involve following patients from the emergency department to the hospital to the clinic, is also something students in the city don't get to see very often, Le says.
"Rural settings used to be the last place medical students, especially Canadian graduates, would want to practice. But now you see the perceptions turning around because of the diversity rural medicine offers," says Kim Fleming, Alberta Health Services' physician recruiter for the North Zone. "It's great to see Chris blogging about the opportunities in Hinton, where you get to utilize all the skills you're taught in medical school."
Le hopes that keeping a blog will be helpful for future students.
"Maybe someone else in a medical school will want to know what it's like to spend some time in a rural site, and by sharing my experience, I can help them understand that," he says.
When he wasn't working or studying, Le enjoyed attending outings with clinic staff, snowboarding, and singing in a men's choir.
"Building these relationships reminded me how there is much more to being a physician than just the medicine," Le wrote in his blog.