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Dr. Jill Konkin is a professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Alberta, where she also serves as the Interim Rural Integrated Community Clerkship Coordinator and the Co-Lead, Social Justice Community of Service and Scholarship for the Department of Family Medicine. Dr. Konkin’s firsthand familiarity with rural Canadian communities can be traced to her childhood growing up in rural Saskatchewan, in a town of 2,900 inhabitants.
Despite Dr. Konkin’s long career as a rural family physician, she began her academic journey as a student of political science at Carleton University, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1970. This path of study helped to cement her commitment to social justice, which has gone on to be a guiding principle throughout her career and informed her passion for health equity.
Dr. Konkin’s entire career has been focused on rural medicine, from full-time comprehensive rural generalist practice for almost 20 years in Alberta to more recently as a locum in rural communities after becoming a full-time academic.In her academic role, she developed a longitudinal integrated clerkship program where students can spend their entire third year of medical school living and learning in a rural Alberta community. Dr. Konkin has long advocated for the importance of this firsthand experience, saying “if you don’t see it, you won’t do it,” going on to add that with most Canadian medical schools located in metropolitan areas, it is crucial that medical students are given the opportunity to train in communities that they may one day serve.
Creating these opportunities is not simply a logistical hurdle to be overcome, but rather a matter of fundamental importance for Dr. Konkin – that of social accountability in medical schools. Dr. Konkin worked to address this in her previous role as the Associate Dean and Division Director, Community Engagement at the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta. The Division was built upon the idea of engaging communities by bringing them into the discussion around how to best address their needs, including what should be included in medical school curricula, what qualities students should have, and how students should be selected.
Dr. Konkin continues to advance the concept of social accountability in medical schools in her role as the Co-Lead, Social Justice Community of Service and Scholarship. This program is based on community service learning principles and offers first and second year medical students the opportunity to work withcommunity organizations.It also provides seminars ontopics such as critical consciousness, and power and privilege, with the goal of familiarizing students with how to apply theory to practice early in their medical careers.
While acknowledging the many challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Konkin sees a silver lining, saying, “students that chose rural programs actually got a better education through COVID.” All clerkships were shut down in March 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but due to the advocacy of Dr. Konkin and some of her colleagues, students in the Rural Integrated Community Clerkship (ICC) were able to begin practicing again after six weeks (as opposed to three months for their urban peers). Recalling the motivation for her advocacy, Dr. Konkin says, “These are people who are going to managing the next pandemic for us...our rural teachers were happy to have the students in the communities, students had already been there since August the year before, and so were very much part of their teams, and in the same ways they were keeping themselves as safe as they could as we learned more and more about this...why wouldn’t the students still be seeing people with this?”
The students completing the ICC during the COVID-19 pandemic also had the opportunity to provide care for significantly more patients per day than their peers in urban communities, and to see these patients in a variety of settings (hospitals, clinics, and homes). They were able to gain valuable firsthand experience about how to manage a pandemic, while simultaneously being authentic members of their rural health teams. Konkin feels that this experience allowed the COVID-19 pandemic to be, “more real to them, in a way of figuring out how to be as safe as you can while still having a really good medical education.”
Over the course of her career, Dr. Konkin has seen several waves of Internationally Educated Health Professionals (IEHPs) come to Canada and work as physicians in rural communities. These have included physicians from Britain and Ireland, South Africa, and physicians from sub-Saharan Africa who immigrated to Canada via South Africa. Dr. Konkin recalls the important role that IEHPs have played in providing medical care for communities in rural Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, but notes that there are challenges in retaining these professionals in rural communities.
To hear more from Dr. Konkin on rural health, newcomers, and IEHPs, watch N4’s May 25, 2022 webinar, “IEHPs - How to Support Medical Needs of Newcomers in Rural Communities.”
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