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North Shore hospital closures ‘a wicked problem’ with no clear fix
Posted: June 18, 2025
(June 18, 2025) By: Greg McGrath-Goudie, SooToday.com
MPP Bill Rosenberg compared the ongoing bidding and fighting for doctors to ‘the Hunger Games’
Picture this.
You’ve just had a stroke.
But when you show up at your local emergency room, the doors are closed due to a doctor shortage.
Along the North Shore of Lake Huron, it’s a worry that community members live with, and local health-care providers are scrambling to avoid – bringing doctors from as far away as Nova Scotia to keep emergency rooms open.
For Thessalon’s Mary-Jane Thompson, it’s a problem that was important enough to put her small town hospital centre stage in Queen’s Park, when she travelled to Toronto to speak with the Ontario Health Coalition in late May.
“When I had a stroke in 2003, Thessalon Hospital saved my life,” Thompson said at the press conference in Toronto.
“And when my husband had a heart attack in 2013, he was stabilized in Thessalon Hospital and is alive today because of it.”
“We are two of thousands over the years who are alive and well because of the hospital. Now our little hospital is in serious trouble,” she said.
In the span of just a few years, Thessalon has lost its lone family doctor and the hospital’s four inpatient beds, on top of contending with sporadic and continual emergency room closures – an issue faced in nearby St. Joseph Island as well.
Across April and May alone, there were a full eight days where the Thessalon Hospital was closed and one day where the Richard’s Landing hospital on St. Joseph Island was closed. Those closures left residents with a lengthy trip to Sault Ste. Marie or Blind River to access emergency care.
The current situation is a far cry from what the Thessalon Hospital used to be – which Thompson hopes can be restored for her small town of 1,400 people.
“We had family doctors and everything here in Thessalon, pretty much until COVID,” she told SooToday.
“You could actually stay in the hospital, and because (Algoma Manor Nursing Home) is right beside that, it was very convenient, too, for families,” she said.
“If their loved ones were near death, then they’d bring them over to the hospital. Then people could come and be with them.”
Thompson hasn’t taken the hospital’s decline lying down: she’s helped organize protests, engaged local politicians and health officials, and collected dozens of stories from community members – which she took with her on her trip to Queen’s Park.
As she advocates for better health-care in her community, local health-care providers are doing everything they can to keep hospital doors open.
‘A wicked problem’
The hospitals in Thessalon, St. Joseph Island, and Blind River are overseen by the North Shore Health Network, a local health-care organization that’s had to bring doctors in from all over to keep emergency rooms running.
The area’s hospitals are supported by local family clinics where doctors sign on to a rural northern physician group agreement and each fills a certain number of shifts at local emergency rooms.
Currently only four of the available 13.5 positions meant to support St. Joseph Island and Thessalon are filled. For Thessalon, which lost its last family doctor in 2022, zero of the three locally available physician posts are filled.
As a result, NSHN relies heavily on locum doctors, or temporary physicians, from out of town to cover 70 per cent of its emergency room shifts each and every month.
“It’s – in a very strict sense of the term – a wicked problem,” Tim Vine, CEO of NSHN, told SooToday.
Every month, Vine and his staff scramble to fill the majority of NSHN’s emergency room shifts, which are part of a locum physician’s responsibilities when they come to town.
“We’ve got somewhere between 10 and 12 shifts a month covered. The rest of the 30 shifts would be covered by the locums,” he said.
Faced with an uphill battle to staff its emergency rooms, NSHN works with locum doctors to keep its hospitals afloat.
“We’re in constant email contact with our book of locum physicians, trying to get them to sign on,” he said.
“We increase the frequency of that communication as we get closer to an impending closure – we’ll often follow up with text messages and that sort of thing.”
Despite his team’s efforts to juggle coverage – sometimes offering to swap shifts around to make emergency room schedules work – Vine said they don’t always succeed.
On those days, emergency rooms have no choice but to close.
NSHN recently hired a physician recruitment coordinator to bring permanent family doctors to the area, but smaller communities struggle to compete with larger municipalities, which can offer much more lucrative incentives for family physicians to move to town.
“You’ve probably heard of communities like Haliburton, that’s offering an $80,000 signing bonus,” Vine said.
“Our communities can’t support that level of payment, and we certainly aren’t funded for . . . any incentives for physicians in that way.”
It’s created a situation where the province’s smaller communities face an even more daunting version of the doctor shortage faced all over Ontario.
“We’re just bidding up all of these services in a way that’s really unsustainable,” Vine said.
“It means that places like us, who don’t have the funding, communities that don’t have the tax base to be able to offer those types of things, get left further and further behind.”
And it’s not only emergency rooms paying the price.
During the pandemic, Thessalon’s four inpatient beds – spread across only two rooms – closed due to concerns about keeping patients safe, and they never reopened.
According to Vine, reopening the beds could create a situation where it’s even more difficult to keep the emergency room open.
“We are getting a lot of locums that aren’t interested in doing 24-hour hospitalist service. They’re really just there to do the emergency department service,” Vine said.
“If we ask them to do both, my worry would be we’d have a number of doctors who – that’s not their forte, that’s not their area – they would simply stop coming and put us further behind in being able to maintain that level of service.”
As a result, North Shore Health Network is left scrambling to keep its emergency rooms open, actively recruiting doctors against communities that can offer larger incentives, and trying not to deter the doctors who actually do come by asking them to step outside their comfort zones.
‘I think some people are going to move out’
As the North Shore Health Network struggles to keep its hospital doors open, community members in Thessalon worry every day about what might happen if they’re faced with an emergency.
One of those people is Martin Hamilton, who’s relied on the Thessalon Hospital in critical moments over the last several years.
Afflicted with prostate cancer, Hamilton had to drink plenty of water for scheduled biopsies in Sault Ste. Marie – but after he arrived back home in Thessalon he found his bladder blocked on one occasion due to the size of his prostate.
“Down I go to Thessalon Hospital, the doctor and nurses got a catheter in. I was back home in half an hour, feeling good,” he told SooToday.
A couple years later, Martin faced the same problem.
This time, the Thessalon Hospital couldn’t get a catheter in, but they were able to call ahead to the Sault Area Hospital, arrange care upon Martin’s arrival, and give him medication before rushing him to Sault Ste. Marie.
“I was awful lucky there was a doctor here,” Hamilton said.
“They raced me to the Sault, and they had the room waiting for me there, which was good.”
Hamilton’s wife, Kim, has also relied on the local hospital in dire moments.
One one occasion when she struggled with abdominal pain, Kim ultimately learned her appendix was going to burst after a trip to the Thessalon Hospital.
“If she would have stayed home a bit longer, she wouldn’t be here,” Hamilton said.
His family’s health-care close calls have led him to worry about what it will mean for the town.
“I think some people are going to move out, because they’ll move to the Sault where there’s a hospital, right?” he said.
“If you wake up in the middle of the night, like me, what do you do? It’s an hour to go to the Sault.”
Thompson has been gathering stories like Hamilton’s to demonstrate how important hospitals are to smaller communities like Thessalon.
She recently had coffee with an older woman who wasn’t as lucky as the Hamiltons. She had to leave Thessalon to access urgent care when she experienced an issue with her heart.
Although the town was filled with first responders for the North Shore Firefighter Challenge from April 25-27, the hospital was closed throughout that span due to a shortage of doctors to staff the emergency department.
“The town was packed full of people and emergency vehicles, and the hospital was closed, and she thought she was maybe having a heart attack,” Thompson said.
“She called the ambulance, and they said the hospital’s closed,” she said.
“They said they’d pick her up, and they took her to Blind River. That’s the first level, and then if it’s worse than that, then they’d go (elsewhere).”
Watching the Thessalon Hospital slowly downgrade from a place with inpatient beds to a place that can’t consistently keep its emergency room doors open has sparked Thompson into action.
Once “a thriving resource in our community, it has since been diminished to what amounts to a transfer site,” Thompson said during the press conference at Queen’s Park.
Thompson has engaged politicians at the local and provincial level, and also helped organize a protest where over 100 residents rallied to save the Thessalon Hospital, with many holding signs calling for more doctors to come to the community.
“It was designed for this community – for people who have paid their taxes and worked for the hospital and then at the end of their life be in this community and die in this community, so their families can be around to visit,” she said.
The path forward, however, isn’t entirely clear.
‘There’s no silver bullet’
Asked about what NSHN needs, Vine said “there’s no silver bullet” to address its ongoing issues.
“It involves money, for sure, but money is not the thing that’s going to solve this,” he said.
“It involves, I think, a lot more coordination at the system level about – what are the reasonable services to have, and where should they be located? How are they funded? What are the expectations?”
One part of the answer is more doctors – but that’s a longer term solution.
“We need more physicians in the province of Ontario – they take about six years once they start medical school to be ready, to be fully independent providing service,” he said.
“We need to grow medical school enrolment, but that’s not going to solve the problem today.”
When she travelled to Queen’s Park last month, Thompson was one of many who raised concern about hospitals around the province, when she joined the Ontario Health Coalition to attend the Ontario legislature’s question period and host a press conference.
Attendees spoke about similar conditions in Durham, where emergency room hours have been limited and inpatient beds have been closed, as well as in Chelsey, where the emergency room is only open five days per week.
Some took direct aim at the provincial government, such as Ontario Health Network’s Natalie Mehra, who said the group tracked 1,117 emergency room closures in Ontario through 2024.
“This is a political choice. It’s not a necessity,” said Mehra, executive director with Ontario Health Coalition.
Mehra also took issue with how the Minister of Health, Sylvia Jones, spoke during question period.
“I heard the health minister in question period today. I thought her tone was completely inappropriate, nasty and contemptuous of people who are asking questions about what is an absolutely critical issue in communities.”
When she travelled to Queen’s Park, Thompson told SooToday she hoped to meet with Jones to discuss the issues Thessalon faces – but it never came to fruition.
“She wouldn’t. She never replied, and she wouldn’t meet with any of us,” Thompson said.
Another member of the Progressive Conservatives – Bill Rosenberg, the newly elected MPP for Algoma–Manitoulin – spoke with SooToday about the provincial government’s plans to bolster health care in the area.
Rosenberg, the former mayor of Thessalon, said it’s going to take time to address the issues NSHN faces.
In 2022, for example, the government approved an additional 30 seats and 41 residency positions for the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, but those students won’t be fully-fledged doctors until six years after they enrol.
“We’ve spent the last eight years – there’s been 100,000 nurses hired, 15,000 doctors – but there’s been a lot of retirements,” he said.
“We need bodies, and I think with the local commitment to NOSM and other education facilities, we’re going to increase students going into the system.”
Rosenberg was leery of incentives communities are putting up to compete one another for doctors, and hoped that doctors educated in the north will choose to stay.
“That’s like The Hunger Games almost, right? That undermines the whole system,” he said.
“If you can educate somebody in the north, will they stay in the north? There’s a better chance, for sure.”
He didn’t offer any short term solutions to the problem plaguing hospitals across Ontario – including in his own riding.
“I know it’s hard for people to step back and wait for that,” he said. “I think a short term solution is what we’re really struggling with, right?”
In the meantime, he encouraged community members to continue pushing for solutions.
“Keep advocating for our area. It’s the most important thing they can do,” he said.
“The people we have are very committed, and we don’t want to overload them or burn them out, but if we keep advocating, I think it’s the best . . . we can do right now as the budget rolls out and we see where these programs are taking us.”
