The Bethesda Regional Health Centre in Steinbach now has three full-time doctors who are referred to as Hospitalists. The announcement was made earlier this week by Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen.

Dr. Denis Fortier, vice-president of Medical Services for Southern Health, explains the role of a hospitalist.

"Historically in rural Manitoba, family physicians would have admitted their own patients, they would have taken care of those patients, they would have discharged those patients. Increasingly, for a number of reasons, we've seen some family physicians decide that hospital work is not for them. Patient care is becoming a little bit more complicated and for all of those reasons, some people have moved away hospital care so we've hired physicians to come in and take care of patients admitted to hospital and those people are called Hospitalists."

Dr. Fortier says hospital work often takes up 40% of the time of a family physician and by discontinuing the hospital work, those physicians have more time to see patients at their clinic. He notes there are still some family physicians who do hospital work in Steinbach and there is plenty of work for both them and the hospitalists at Bethesda. He says the hospitalists work in shifts to provide service 24 hours a day, seven days per week. Dr. Fortier says they are also looking at having these specialists serve as a back-up to the emergency room physician.

"Sometimes our emergency physicians are required to leave the department because they are taking care of a very sick patient and that requires an ambulance transfer. Sometimes it actually takes the emergency physician outside of the department for an hour or so. We are looking to develop some expectations of our Hospitalists that say they would step into the Emergency Room or they would step into the ambulance to be part of that transfer so that we can have continuity of services at Bethesda."