Local high school students in Hanover, Ontario are spending this week getting a real-world look at careers in medicine, nursing, and other health fields during the second annual Discovery Healthcare Camp at Hanover and District Hospital.
Running from July 20 to 24, the camp is a partnership between the hospital and the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University. It gives students entering grades 9 through 13 a chance to try hands-on clinical skills like suturing, casting, using a stethoscope, and wound dressing, while also shadowing working healthcare professionals.
The goal is simple: get young people excited about healthcare careers close to home. Right now, about 16 percent of Canadians live in rural communities, but only 7 percent of doctors work there. Ontario alone expects to need over 33,000 more nurses and 50,000 personal support workers by 2032.
“We are thrilled to welcome Discovery Health Camp back to Hanover & District Hospital for a second consecutive year,” said Dana Howes, the hospital’s president and CEO. Howes, a registered nurse herself, has led the hospital since 2019 and knows firsthand how early exposure can shape career paths.
The camp is led by first- and second-year medical students from Schulich, where educators see the program as a way to build a future rural workforce. Dr. Victor Ng, the assistant dean of distributed education at Schulich, has spent more than a decade practicing emergency medicine in rural and remote Ontario and believes camps like this can make a difference.
One former camper, Elijah Van Dinther, is now a medical student at Schulich. He grew up in Watford and attended the camp in Sarnia, then went on to study medicine after shadowing a nurse in post-op and learning about rural healthcare gaps. “Seeing what I could do to help combat the health-care shortage in rural communities was such an important lesson for me from that camp,” he said.
The camp runs daily from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and costs $325.99 plus tax. It is one of 10 such camps offered across Southwestern Ontario this summer, each aiming to give the next generation a head start toward careers that keep small communities healthy.
