You might have seen a new face in the operating room at the Pontiac Hospital recently. Allow us to introduce you to Dr. Mathieu Lacroix, a native of France who comes to Shawville after a long international career as a surgeon.
Lacroix spent the first few years of his life in Madagascar before returning to his parents’ home country of France at the age of six. After high school, he decided to pursue a general medicine degree at the Université de la Timone in Marseille, France, where he got the idea to pursue a career in surgery.
“I was in the sixth year of medical school. I was on call at the university hospital in Marseille and I spent the night making sutures on patients that were injured, and I realized that I had an aptitude for the surgery side,” he said of the turning point in his career.
Then, he pursued his training in surgery at universities in Saint-Étienne and Lyon, France before working abroad in various locations. Dr. Lacroix worked on Reunion Island, a French overseas territory off the shore of Madagascar, as well as for the Red Cross in South America before returning to the island of Corsica, in the Mediterranean.
He lived in France a while longer before starting the process of coming to Canada, which involved taking an equivalency program in Montreal before being certified to work as a surgeon in Canada.
“My wife has family living in Montreal, so we got to know Quebec and we fell in love with the country [ . . . ] so when the opportunity came up, we seized it and did what we needed to do to come work here,” he said.
When he saw the job posting at the hospital, he and his wife Laetitia jumped on the opportunity to move to Shawville, where they have been living for about a month.
“After doing an inventory of the different regions we found the Pontiac region really magnificent, and it corresponds to the lifestyle we wanted,” he said.
Dr. Lacroix is on call every other week, and his weeks consist of doing various surgeries including gall bladder surgeries and colorectal surgeries, as well as doing consultations with patients who are undergoing surgery.
CISSSO’s Pontiac network director Nicole Boucher-Larivière said retaining a second surgeon to work alongside Dr. Freydoun Homayounfar allows the Pontiac Hospital to retain its status as a “trauma hospital” – a status she said few rural hospitals have because they don’t have the staff to maintain the 24/7 availability.
“It’s extremely important when you’re in an area of 14,000 square kilometres to be able to offer that proximity service in case of a trauma, so for us it was extremely important to find that second surgeon so we wouldn’t lose that,” she said, adding that with two surgeons alternating weeks on call, the hospital will retain its availability.
She added that the general wait time for surgery is very short in the Pontiac compared to other hospitals in the Outaouais, and the wait time in the OR is a far cry for where it used to be when there was only one surgeon on call 24/7 to service the area.
“By having two surgeons we’ll be able to maintain those wait times short enough so that the population of the Pontiac can have access quickly to general surgeries,” she said.
Lacroix said he had two mentors in particular while studying surgery in Lyon and Saint-Étienne who taught him the precision and stamina needed for the job. He said that in a precise craft such as surgery, the teacher-student relationship is an important one to learn the proper movements.
“Like an artisan that teaches certain movements to a child, there is a certain tradition of mentorship. To know how to practice surgery, you must first have a master that takes the time to teach you with kindness,” he said.
He said that while the operating room is a high-stakes environment, he has always enjoyed doing emergency surgery.
“That’s why I made these professional choices where I was in an isolated environment in case of emergency. That’s why I worked for the Red Cross, that’s also why I did a lot of training with the French military [ . . . ] because I had a knack for emergency surgery,” he said.
He said his experience working in various remote locations around the world has allowed him to develop a wider range of specialities, as opposed to medicine practiced in urban centres, which is much more specialized.
“I had the chance to be in a service where I had to be competent in these different specialities [ . . . ] I had to be able to have a great range of skills and be able to deal with situations that are quite different,” he said.
Meanwhile, he said while working in rural environments has allowed him to develop a greater skillset, there are also certain challenges to rural medicine including knowing when to transfer the patient to a more specialized surgeon.
“You have to strike the right balance between providing service to the local population and knowing the limits of your knowledge and when you must transfer the patient to a more specialized surgeon,” he said.
Boucher-Larivière said the surgeries that require a transfer to a larger urban hospital are managed by a college for specialists.
“We can do anything that’s considered a general surgery, but there are certain types of surgeries that require a specialist in that field, depending on the complexity of the surgery. We do day surgeries, or surgeries where you’re in for a night, maybe two, but we don’t have surgeries that require a long, complex stay,” she said.
Dr. Lacroix said that while Shawville is definitely a change of scenery from the mostly tropical locations where he has worked before, he got the travel bug and wanted to experience life in Canada.
“It’s a family virus [ . . . ] when I returned to France our house was filled with furniture and decorations from Madagascar, some of which I still have with me today.”
Outside of work, he said he and his wife enjoy their life at home with their dog Pascal. “We like the quiet moments that we can’t find in the city,” he said, adding that he enjoys working with his hands doing things like clearing the house or mowing the lawn.
Boucher-Larivière said the recruitment of general doctors as well as specialists to the region has been successful due to the collaboration of community partners such as the MRC Pontiac, the Groupe de médecine familiale du Pontiac (GMF), and other partners who are helping attract young professionals to the region.
“Everybody puts their effort in to do a little bit of seduction to help them discover the area and help them get established, so I think that’s why we’ve had so much success because as a community we’re working together.”
