Rural Healthcare panel the start of a Queen's innovation project

Jeff Green | Feb 08, 2022

In January, members of the Queen's University Dunin-Deshpande Innovation Centre, including Academic Director Jim Mclelland, convened a panel to discuss the obstacles and opportunities for rural healthcare in Frontenac County.

Tracey Snow, who recently took on a new role as the rural economic development officer for the City of Kingston, hosted the panel. Among the panelists were Gary Oosterhoff, the member of Kingston City Council for the countryside ward, which includes the region between the border of South Frontenac and Hwy. 41, Claire Bouvier, the founder of FEIST (Female Entrepreneurs In Small Towns) as well as two subject experts, Meredith Prikker, a chronic disease management nurse with the Sydenham Medical Clinic, who has also worked with the Verona Medical Clinic, and Louise Moody, the Executive Director of Rural Frontenac Community Services, which is based in Sharbot Lake.

The panel discussed a variety of issues affecting rural healthcare delivery that will be familiar to Frontenac County residents, transportation challenges for those who do not have access to a vehicle and gaps in Internet service at many locations were common themes.

Claire Bouvier said that there are a new class of health professionals who are part of the exodus from urban areas to rural areas, and they face a set of challenges such as travel distance for their clientele, a lack of marketing experience as well as what she called the biggest challenge, “the need to balance compassion with profitability”.

Gary Oosterhoff said that Kingston is “an urban-centric municipality” and described the region that he represents as the “gateway to the real rural areas”. He said that rural healthcare is “a concern but not an acute problem for my constituents because of their proximity to urban based services but I am interested to hear more because I want to hear what is happening. These issues are also of concern because of the aging at home strategy that we are pursuing in senior care.”

There is also a wide range of population density in Frontenac County from South to North in the 4,000 square kilometre region. The population density is 8 people per square kilometre in the three most populated districts in South Frontenac, which diminishes to 1.3 people per square kilometre in North Frontenac. In urban Kingston there is a population of 83 people per square kilometre.

Meredith Prikker was the only panel member who is a front line healthcare worker in Frontenac County. She spends a lot of her working time helping connect individuals to community resources in Sydenham and the rural region surrounding it.

“It is hard work to keep people in their home, which is where they want to be, rurally,” she said. “There are a number of challenges. We deal with patients who live about 20 to 30 minutes north of Kingston, and are facing an ongoing shortage of community nurses and Personal Support Workers. They are driving long distances between clients, and because they are using their own vehicles to get from one client to another, it makes working in rural communities less attractive.”

She said that with the resources of the primary care setting where she works, and Southern Frontenac Community Services nearby, “we still face ongoing challenges even though we have some of these excellent resources. With workers from the Maltby Centre and others who come out, our clients deal with long wait times, issues with awareness, and a lack of reliable transportation can be a barrier.

“Another challenge is housing. The demand for supportive housing is greater than the supply, and people are living in environments that are not suitable for them. We have an aging population and not enough senior housing.”

She said that 53% of tenants in the region spend more than 30% of their monthly income on housing, which is one of the ways the Province of Ontario describes the poverty line.

“The shortage of primary care services is also a factor,” Prikker said. “In 2009, it was estimated that 7.9% of the rural population were unattached to primary care, and that can only have risen. I see a lot of unattached patients in our rural area.

Louise Moody explained that Rural Frontenac Community Services provides a very similar set of services for seniors as Southern Frontenac Community Services does in Sydenham, and also offers a volunteer based transportation service, for all ages, throughout Frontenac County, as well as the EarlyOn program for preschool children.

She said that transportation is always an issue in the region where she works, where people live from 45 to 90 minutes from service centres in Kingston, Perth, or Napanee.

“We see everything from a rural lens, and thanks to the Family Health Teams in Sharbot Lake and Northbrook, we can provide services based in the rural area. It is more efficient for one person to travel up Road 38 to provide service for many clients in one centre, such as we have with the Family Health Team in Sharbot Lake, than for all those people to travel to Kingston,” she said.

A lively question and answer session took place after the panelists had all answered a series of questions posed by Tracey Snow. About 30 people attended the Zoom based session.

The team from the Queen's innovation centre, which include faculty member Jim Mclellan as well as program coordinators Bruna Guarina Moreas and Megan Sieroka, organised the panel to kickstart a rural initiative in Frontenac County. This is an extension of the Health Innovation YGK initiative that they are working on with the City of Kingston and other partners.

They said, when interviewed after the end of the panel discussion, that part of what they are hoping to accomplish is to do an inventory of health care services offered in Frontenac County communities. They can then provide some of the tools they have developed over the ten year existence of the Dunin-Deshpande Centre to help find solutions to some long standing problems.

“In order for this to be a successful project,” Jim Mclellan said, “it must become embedded in the rural communities and build local capacity. For this to succeed, the design parameters of the project need to include embededness as a core value.”

They said that the members of the panel and the other people who watched the panel, will hopefully become engaged in the project.

“We have talked to a number of people while organising this first event,” said Megan Sieroka, “who we will be seeking to engage as well.”

“The next step, after we complete a report on what was said at the panel, work will get underway to do some systems mapping of services that are currently available in the Frontenac region,” said Bruna Guarina Moreas.

Jim Mclellan said “we are looking forward to creating a rural health lab, anchored in Sharbot Lake or wherever it makes sense, to look at community opportunities. As people coming from outside these communities, we are not going to be the ones who come up with solutions, that can only come from within the communities. We act as a catalyst.”

In addition to helping develop better healthcare, the project is also hoping to help develop business opportunities for a variety of health service providers in Frontenac County.

Megan Sieroka is the contact person for the project. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.