This week, we celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8 and Canadian Women Physicians Day on March 11. In this four-part series, we’re excited to introduce you to four women physicians who are making a difference across Nova Scotia Health’s zones.
The path to medicine and the Northern Zone wasn’t direct for Dr. Whitney Lum.
The Vancouver native had been teaching middle school after completing her master’s degree in genetics and molecular biology; it was an appointment with her own family doctor that gave her the courage to pursue family medicine.
“She’d always encouraged me to do it from the start, but that appointment was the final push I needed to give it a try,” she says.
Whitney attended medical school in the U.K. before doing her residency training with Dalhousie in Fredericton. And while she thought she would work in New Brunswick, a meeting with project navigator Nicole LeBlanc from Healthy Pictou County brought her to Nova Scotia Health in 2019.
Whitney is very happy with her choice – spending time with her family in nature, and contributing professionally to improving the health of Nova Scotians.
She was instrumental in building the hospitalist program at Aberdeen Hospital, where she served as lead for three years. “It’s been really rewarding to help it get off the ground – it’s been gratifying to see that the program is thriving and stable,” she says.
Today, Whitney has a family medicine clinic in Pictou County and will soon be moving to the Highland Health Home and Learning Centre in New Glasgow. She is the medical director at a couple of nursing homes, as well as department head of the Northern Zone for Family Practice.
She loves the day-to-day flexibility her job brings, as well as the connections she gets to build with patients of all ages. “It’s extremely rewarding to build relationships with generations within a family…to be a part of so many phases of a person’s life,” she says.
Whitney wants girls and women considering a career in medicine to know there is a place for them here, even if the path isn’t always direct.
“Your path may have some detours, like mine did, but every step of the way allows for growth. If medicine is something you are passionate about, it is absolutely worth the effort,” she says.
Visit https://physicians.nshealth.ca/news to read other profiles in this four-part series.
