Community groups, organizations and businesses have joined forces to showcase the River City’s best features to potential new physicians.

The Red Carpet program, a unique partnership between Venture Kamloops and Interior Health launched in May, has the support of local financial institutions, real estate companies and Rotary/Roterac clubs.

Gail Scott, CEO of Venture Kamloops, said the combination of a large number of doctors retiring and not enough people entering the field has created a “perfect storm” that has left many Kamloops residents without a physician.

“What we’re looking at is how we can attract doctors to our community specifically and what we can do to keep them here,” she said.

“Kamloops is the best place, in our opinion, to work, to play and to live . . . So we need to roll out the red carpet.”

Kamloops is short 17 general practitioners (GPs) and, with a doctor-patient ratio of one to 1,000, that equates to 17,000 people without a family doctor, Scott said.

“That’s an awful lot of people for the size of the community of Kamloops — that’s too many.

“As Kamloops grows — and we’re growing at a very healthy, strong rate of 4,500 people per year — we could see, in three years, that we’re going to need 25 doctors.”

In addition to packages with free golf, free dinner and hotel accommodations, the program wants to help doctors and their families make a seamless transition when moving to Kamloops.

The idea is to initiate social-dinner functions, job-placement assistance for spouses and school-buddy programs for children.

“When the program was launched a couple months ago, we got instant responses from the community, asking how they could help,” Scott said.

“From that, we knew we had a solid winner.”

Wendy Snelling, business retention and expansion manager for Venture Kamloops, has been on the hunt for new doctors, attending two immigration fairs last year in Scotland and England.

“One of the reasons we chose the UK is that it’s easier to transfer their skills to Canada,” Snelling said, adding there’s been plenty of hits on Kamloops websites from that area.

“So it’s not just a finger in the wind choosing any country.”

Her travels were met with success, conducting on-the-spot interviews and getting five potential doctors into the Interior.

“The more people we can get on board with this, the easy we can make that decision for a physician.”

There are also other doctors in the inquiry stages of visiting Kamloops, with another seven GPs having expressed an interest in relocating.

The goal is to bring in a minimum of 10 doctors in the next few months.

Kamloops Coun. Jim Harker, representing the Aurora Rotary Club, said the club’s membership includes five doctors, all of whom are interested in participating in the Red Carpet program.

“This is the greatest place on Earth and we live right in the heart of it — everybody who lives here knows that,” Harker said.

“So how do we convey that message so we get them to stay here once here?”

To make that happen, the program’s committee is looking for additional community partners to help organize social functions, donate incentives or services and possibly be community ambassadors to show visiting doctors around the city.

Essentially, Scott said, the program boils down to good marketing and that Venture Kamloops is going to have to “bite the bullet in some aspects” to make it a success.

“And we’re willing to do that — but we can’t do it alone.”