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Nothing Ordinary: The Story of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine

Northern Ontario is a vast territory — almost as big as France and Germany combined — with a widely scattered population the size of only 10% of the rest of the province. While rich in forests, minerals, scenery and brilliant, hardy people, Ontario’s north, like many other rural and remote areas, require specially trained doctors equipped to handle the unique demands of the region and its people. They had difficulties attracting and keeping medical talent.

The solution, they decided, was to train their own.

Written by author Larry Krotz, Nothing Ordinary tells the unique success story of how 800,000 citizens created their own school of medicine, and what it has meant for the region and its people. It serves as a model for community-based problem-solving, applicable to rural and remote communities across Canada.

The Northern Ontario School of Medicine produces an astonishing percentage of graduates who remain to serve the needs of their home communities, from rural, to Indigenous, to Francophone. These communities require medical practitioners with general knowledge of a wide range of scenarios, from birth to mining accident to death. To reduce unnecessary patient travel, they must be able to treat patients through virtual means.

The school has trained almost 700 doctors, 95% of whom work in the North across Canada — and student demographics actually reflect those of the community, with roughly 12% who are Indigenous and 20% who are Francophone. Upon graduation, these doctors go on to join advisory groups and become mentors, residency hosts, and ‘distributed’ faculty, creating a vibrant and interconnected community that continues to produce and support its own future doctors.

Over the course of twenty years, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine has transformed healthcare and created a legacy of a school that is far from ordinary.

Larry Krotz is a writer and documentary filmmaker who has worked with the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Literary Review of Canada, the National Film Board of Canada, and PBS. He is the author of ten works of non-fiction, a novel, and a picture book. Krotz currently lives in Toronto, ON.
Nothing Ordinary is scheduled for publication in October 2021.

Editor’s Note: Indigo is currently accepting pre-orders for this book.

 

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