Dr Shahram Masouleh, Practice Ready Ontario, and Sharbot Lake Family Health Team

Jeff Green | Jan 16, 2025

In late December of 2024, 53 years after starting his practice in a trailer in the parking lot of the Sharbot Lake Country Inn, Dr. Peter Bell finally found a pathway to retirement.

And that pathway came in the person of Dr. Shahram Masouleh, who is gradually taking over Dr. Bell's roster of patients, a process that will take at least a year and a half.

The Family Health Team (FHT) includes: Doctor Danny Cunic, and Nurse Practitioner Carla Gunn who also have rosters, as well as nurses and associated healthcare professionals offering a basket of services for residents of the surrounding area. The FHT is located in a facility that is owned by Central Frontenac Township and supported by the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care

Dr. Masouleh has undertaken a long journey of his own on his way to Sharbot Lake.

He began his career, following in his father's footsteps as a practitioner of General Medicine in his native Iran, eventually shifting his practice to focus on rehabilitation as a speciality.

“I always had the idea of travelling somewhere to practice medicine,” he said, during an interview at the FHT last week, “and I even learned German, with the idea of moving someday to Germany.”

That all changed when he met and married his wife, who is an engineer and an educator.

She was not as interested in learning German, but was open to changing locations. 

After the birth of their first child, and shook up by the 2017 earthquake in Iran, the couple decided to move to Canada, to Toronto, where there is a large Iranian community.

The area north of Finch Avenue all the way to Richmond Hill is rich with Iranian culture, so much so that, as Dr. Masouleh said the area has the nickname, Tehranto, a reference to Is it best to use the same fingering always?Iran's capital and largest city, Tehran.

But instead of living in the Iranian expatriate community, the Masoulehs lived in the downtown area, closer to the centre of medicine.

But it was not easy for Shahram to find a job. He had to do some training and testing to obtain his medical credentials in Canada, which took about 18 months. He continued to practice virtually in Iran through his father's practice, but finding a medical job in Toronto was difficult.

“I was living in downtown Toronto, surrounded by all of the hospitals, and I could not find anything. I sent an email to all of them, but there was no response for one and half years, until I started as a research assistant in the Toronto Rehab Institute,” he said. He then took a second research assistant job at the Westpark Healthcare centre, and when he was there an opening for a clinical fellowship came up, which he took on.

Then came the second immigration for the Masouleh family.

“My wife found her dream job at Queen's. She is by nature a teacher, so when she found a job in the faculty at Queen's, we decided to move to Kingston. I once told her if she found a job in China I would follow her there, which would have been impossible, I know, so Kingston was where we went.”

He kept working in Toronto, spending weekends in Kingston, but after 18 months that was not working for him.

“I did not want to be a part-time husband and father,” he said.

As part of the effort to deal with the physician shortage in Ontario, particularly in family medicine, the Ministry of Health established a new program just over a year ago. It is called Practice Ready Ontario (PRO). The program is designed for people like Dr. Masouleh and practices like the Sharbot Lake FHT, who are in need of doctors.

PRO is a pilot program, administered by the Touchstone Institute.

On its website, PRO describes its mission to be a “positive development for the public in Ontario and for internationally trained physicians who hope to work in the province. The program provides a pathway for internationally trained physicians to become licensed more rapidly.

“Hiring more physicians is the most effective step to ensure that you and your family are able to see a doctor where and when you need to. Practice Ready Ontario will provide up to 100 new family physicians by the end of 2025. All successful candidates are required by the provincial government to fulfill a three-year return of service as a family physician in a rural high needs community.”

Dr. Masouleh joined the program in the spring of 2024, and spent several months establishing his credentials, including a stint at the hospital in Brockville for a clinical assessment.

The Sharbot Lake FHT, being located within an hour of his home in Kingston, was a potential location, and after meeting with Dr. Bell in the summer, the process of satisfying all of the program's requirements got underway.

The program is so new, that it does not even have a set procedure for letting doctors know that their application has been approved.

“Nobody called me to say, congratulations, you are accepted to practice in Sharbot Lake. I did not know until late November, when I received the permission to start.”

The program requires that Dr. Bell act in a supervisory role for at least 18 months, or as long as 3 years, which is the term of service for Dr. Masouleh. 

In practical terms, Dr. Masoleh is gradually assuming Doctor Bell's roster over the next six to 12 months, and after 18 months he can undertake a new set of exams, before assuming full responsibility for the roster.

“I tell the patients when I meet them, that while so many people in Ontario don't have a family doctor, they are lucky enough to have two,” he said.

Since starting work in Sharbot Lake, Dr. Masouleh said that he has been on a new learning curve, with a lot of support from the team at the clinic.

“There are lots of serious patients that I have been meeting. There are many specialties for referrals, and I am not familiar with all of them yet. And there is Lyme, and there are literally thousands of potential diagnoses that come from Lyme, so I need to learn as I go. Where I came from there was lots of Malaria, here it is Lyme. The rurality of the area is also something I need to learn about.”

He described how he spent 1/2 an hour with one patient, and then spent an hour looking at the patient record and all the notes.

Much of the training that he has undertaken since coming to Canada, is not so much about medical conditions and diagnosis, but about the culture of medical practice in Canada.

“Disease is disease, it is the same everywhere, and the treatments are always developing but they are the same around the world. But how you address a patient, how you touch a patient, how you give a patient bad news, these are all very culturally specific. It is not the same here as it is in the United States even, and that is a lot of what I have learned and continue to learn with the patients here.”

One thing that has been of tremendous help, he said, has been the support of the staff at the Sharbot Lake FHT.

“Everybody has been very helpful, they want to give me the best chance to succeed, and I appreciate that very much,” he said.

But it is a tall order to take on patients who have been served by the same doctor for 20, 30, or up to 50 years.

“Dr. Bell knows his patients, he knows their family. That's a lot of information that I do not have. But he is still here, so that is a big help. And the patients have been very supportive as well, very friendly.”