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The regional health authority is your most important partner in the healthcare track.
Approach them early. The conversation should happen at least 4-5 months before the weekend. Health authorities are bureaucracies; they cannot turn around a hospital tour in three weeks.
Find the right person. The job titles vary, but you are looking for someone in: physician recruitment, nursing recruitment, workforce strategy, or health human resources. The communications department is usually a dead end for this conversation; they will not have decision-making authority.
When you call, the framing is: we are bringing healthcare workers from across the country (or the continent) to visit this region for a weekend. Would you like to be part of it?
The conversation then moves to specifics. They will want to know:
Be honest about the answers. Some of them will be vague — you will not know exactly how many cardiologists are coming until people RSVP. That is fine. Health authorities understand that voluntary events have soft numbers.
Their main contributions are typically:
In return, they get exposure to a self-selected group of healthcare workers who have already signalled interest in relocating to their region. That is an incredibly valuable recruitment audience, and they know it.
When we did the Infusion in Nanaimo, our regional health authority (Island Health) made these cards to hand out. The people pictured are American healthcare workers who moved to Nanaimo, and the back invited people to send their info to Island Health for follow-up.
