Building a Medical Service in Sharbot Lake

Jeff Green | Aug 07, 2025

Peter Bell - Part 2

When Dr. Peter Bell started seeing patients in the summer of 1971 from his makeshift clinic in the parking lot of the Sharbot Lake Country Inn, and then from his clinic at the south end of the Sharbot Lake beach starting 1973, he took on the role of a country doctor.

He made house calls, travelling along the back roads after clinic hours to see patients who were housebound. He was on-call on many weekends, and in the first couple of years he even did a few home births.

One of his strengths,  as a clinician and as a community member and parent, has been his ability to listen and ask questions. He took an interest in the lives of his patients and in the history of the local community. The historical photos in the Sharbot Lake Family Health Team office, some of which go back well over 100 years, all come from his collection.

He began to collaborate to bring more services to Sharbot Lake, from the very beginning of his practice.

“We worked together to bring services here, based on the idea that is more efficient to have one practitioner travel up to Sharbot Lake, than have 20 patients drive in to Kingston,” he said, in an interview last month.

At an event held in late June at the hall of St, James Catholic Church, one of three that were held to mark his retirement, Wayne Robinson talked about the “Communication Group” that had formed just months before Peter Bell arrived.

Robinson said that the group have  formed in response to the fact that “traditional ways of making a living here had disappeared, although there was a need, support services were not there.”

Robinson has been hired, on a grant from St. Lawrence College, as a “community animator”, and the young doctor joined the group.

North Frontenac Community Services (now known as Rural Frontenac Community Services) was the result.

“They developed counselling services, seniors services, mental health supports, and a model for bringing services into this community that is similar to what we have developed on the medical side,” said Bell, “and we have worked collaboratively with them over these many years. It's the Sharbot Lake model.”

While managing his practice, and working with others, Pete Bell also started a family.

One of the  first speakers at the St. James event was his daughter.

She said that as a young doctor, Peter Bell “was doing rounds in a home for unwed mothers, and my dad was doing rounds. And my birth mother recognised something in him, and ans she asked him, ' when my baby is born, would you adopt her?”

She talked about travelling with her father, the love of reading they share, and the personal discipline that he has modeled for his seven children.

“You've touched the lives of your children in many ways, but you have also questioned every person in this room. You've dedicated your life to helping others. I was born under a lucky star, and we all were.”

With a large community to serve, Dr. Bell has sought out other doctors to share the clinic with him over the years, and many of them established strong relationships with the patients and the community  as well. These included Dr. Bob Miller in the late 70's and early 80's, Dr. Candy Fraser into the early 1990's.  He also worked, early on with Nurse Practitioners (NP), starting with Cathy Martin back in the 1970's and  Mary Woodman in the 90's and into the early 2000's.

“Mary came here as a NP student, and ended up staying. She was always an extremely talented clinician, that was the first thing I recognized about her. We became a pilot site for a nurse practitioner, and Mary became an important not only as a clinician, but also as an advocate and a colleague.”

Healthcare reform has been ongoing in Ontario since the 1990's at least, and Peter Bell believes that it has turned out to be easier to foster communication between divese service providers in a rural setting than an urban setting, “because everybody already knows each other because they are working in the next office, not at some location across town”.

In the early 2000's, the Family Health Team model, integrating primary care and other health services in one location, was being developed in Ontario and pilot sites were being chosen.

Peter Bell and Mary Woodman worked on a proposal for Sharbot Lake for over a year, and the effort culminated in a binge writing session with Frances Smith working along with Mary to complete it.

Sharbot Lake was one of the rural sites to be chosen, and this lead to a renovation and expansion of the Medical Centre in 2006.

The Sharbot Lake Family Health Team has a staff team that includes, in addition to two full time doctor's; a part time nurse practitioner, psychiatric services, a Diabetes educator, an Occupational Therapist, two Registered Nurses, a Mental Health Counsellor, and a Health Promoter in addition to a dedicated administration complement.

It has come a long way from the beginning of Dr. Bell's practice, when it was just him and one staff member handling reception and all the administrative work on their own.