Hospitals and communities in rural Nova Scotia will welcome the first crop of students out of the Cape Breton Medical Campus starting next year.

The Sydney campus, a partnership between Dalhousie Medical School and Cape Breton University, is part of a new program that will place students into rural communities for their clerkships, which provide immersive training during their third and fourth years.

Stephanie Langley, the associate dean of the Cape Breton Medical Campus, said the program is designed to increase doctor retention in rural areas.

“It’s an opportunity to have those students come back and do residency training in those communities and then ultimately to stay and practise in those communities,” she said.

“Introducing that rural family-practice life early on in training builds that momentum, and it’s a huge recruitment piece.”

Expansion will cover whole province

The program is an expansion of Dalhousie’s Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (LIC), which launched in 2019 in the Cape Breton Regional Municipality and expanded to the South Shore in 2020. That program stations students in a family practice setting for a full year, with opportunities for specialized training within the community.

Now it’s going to encompass the whole of the province.

Abir Hussein is a family doctor in Yarmouth, N.S., as well as the assistant dean of distributed medical education in Dalhousie’s faculty of medicine. She said the existing LIC programs “have been extremely helpful in retention and recruitment.”

“Having those family doctors in these areas, that are areas of need, will benefit these communities significantly,” she said.

Program to officially start in fall 2027

All 30 members of each cohort out of the Cape Breton campus will be placed throughout the province in rural communities in their third and fourth years. Classes began in the fall of 2025, meaning the program will kickstart in fall of 2027. 

The students will also serve their residencies, which will be in family medicine, in rural areas. They are obligated by a five-year return-of-service contract to practise in Nova Scotia, outside of Halifax, after they graduate.

It all adds up to almost a decade of family doctors learning, working and living in rural Nova Scotia.

While some clerkship opportunities existed for rural placements in the past, much of the training took place in Halifax. With the new program, rural communities will be involved in the full scope of training.

Hussein said the expansion has meant growing the teaching faculty at the Dalhousie medical school, as more doctors have been brought on to act as in-hospital instructors. She said the expectation is that pre-existing residency programs will also grow, as the students graduate into their residencies in the community.

Yarmouth eager to welcome new doctors

Pam Mood, the mayor of Yarmouth, said the town has seen good returns from doctors doing their residencies there, and that she’s excited to see more.

“We introduce the residents to the community, you know, and everyone is on board,” she said. “And we’re finding that the majority are actually staying here.”

She’s hopeful the new program will lead to even more doctors coming to stay.

“I mean, it doesn’t get bigger than that. So we’d be absolutely thrilled if this will help even more.”

MORE TOP STORIES