April 7, 2022 – Dr. Bob Henderson knew that he wanted to become a doctor when he was about 13 years old, and he never seriously considered doing anything else.
As he retires from his 47-year career in family medicine, he reflects that it turned out even better than he expected.
“Medicine is the ultimately flexible profession,” explained Dr. Henderson. “You can do anything – you can be an administrator, you can be a clinician, you can be a researcher, you can be a businessperson. You can set your own schedule and you can do it anywhere you want – rural, urban, remote. It’s really one of the few professions where you can set your own goals and achieve them over time. It’s been wonderful.”
Dr. Henderson grew up in Winnipeg, studied medicine at the University of Manitoba and did his residency at McMaster University. Following graduation, he and his family relocated to northern Ontario for a couple of years.
“Just before that and during that time we had a couple of daughters and decided that we wanted to be a little more central. A few years before, my father-in-law purchased a vacation farm property outside of Warkworth, which brought us into the community. We fell in love with it and decided to move.”
Since Dr. Henderson settled in the Trent Hills community in 1977, he has touched numerous lives as a family physician, and has helped shape and improve rural health care through his involvement in the early development of the Family Health Network model, as past Medical Director at the Trent Hills Family Health Team, former Board Chair of The Bridge Hospice, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto and numerous medical and leadership positions held at Campbellford Memorial Hospital including Chief of Staff for multiple appointment periods.
A long-time focus for Dr. Henderson has been physician recruitment to the community and he started to take residents into his family practice in the early 1980s.
“One of the things that hasn’t changed is the difficulty in recruiting physicians to rural areas,” he shared. “It is something I’ve been committed to through the development of rural family medicine and the process of introducing learners into the rural community to do part of their training and help them to see what a great place it is to work. The hope has been that it helps them decide to work and move into rural community practice.”
When Dr. Henderson reflects on his hope for the future of medicine in the Trent Hills community, top of mind is the stability of health human resources, the continuing presence of a good community hospital and that the Family Health Team continues to provide a broad range of primary care to the community.
“It has always been very important to me and critical to the health care in this community that there is a continuing presence of a good community hospital. The maintenance of a vital community hospital is critical to both providing urgent care to sick patients and to act as the central hub for health care in the community. That has been so over the years and my hope would be that that would continue.”
Dr. Henderson retired from his career in medicine on March 31, 2022.
“A large number of community patients put their trust in me as a family physician to guide them through the healthcare system and help them through various health crises. At the end of the day that’s really what it is all about.”