The People of Primary Care
Meet Dr. Heather McCarrel: Practicing medicine from ringside to bedside
Welcome to our new series, The People of Primary Care: the human stories behind the healthcare you receive at your doctor’s office or healthcare hub.
Dr. Heather McCarrel has always enjoyed doing a little bit of everything.
“As a kid, I’d always say ‘I’m bored’,” she says. “I’d go from wanting to be an astronaut, to a gym teacher, to a professional athlete.”
Now as a family doctor and lead physician for the Carlisle Family Health Organization (or “FHO” – a group of family physicians that work together to provide more comprehensive access to care for patients), she gets to see something new every day.
“You can’t get bored in family medicine,” she explains. She remembers going through rotations, “realizing that what I love is a mixture of it all together.”
A ringside seat
At one of those rotations as a medical resident, she had the opportunity to work with Dr. Kien Trinh, who along with being a sports medicine physician, acupuncturist, and traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner, is also the Medical Director for Boxing Canada.
“You’re sitting right at the ringside, so if you like boxing, you’re right there,” Dr. McCarrel explains. “You do all their physicals early in the morning – checking their knuckles, ribs, lungs, nose, making sure they don’t have obvious fractures. When you’re ringside, the physician has the power to stop a fight if someone’s got their bell rung and looks unsafe.”
She’s practiced the sport herself since university, heading to the boxing gym once or twice a week. Though she’s been encouraged by her gym community to enter a fight, she says that’s not in the cards.
“The competitive me would like to think I could fight somebody if I had to, but no, I will never actually do it,” she laughs.
Putting the “family” in family medicine
After 12 years practicing at Carlisle Medical Centre, Dr. McCarrel has built long-term relationships with patients where she feels like she knows not just them, but their families and communities as well.
“There’s a lot of storytelling in family medicine,” she explains. “Patients become very comfortable. They share all these little details about their family members who you’ve never met but become people you know through them. Those are the things that are fulfilling. You get a sense of their world.”
The relationship goes both ways: Dr. McCarrel explains that patients ask about her family all the time, in part because her two young daughters, ages four and six, “insisted” that their art be displayed in Dr. McCarrel’s clinic room.
Between building couch-cushion gymnastics courses at home to planting apple seeds in the backyard to see if they’ll grow, most of Dr. McCarrel’s time when she’s not in clinic is with them. It’s her family, and the team at the clinic, that energize her even on the hardest days.
A dream team
“It’s a bit cliché to say, but we are family-like,” says Dr. McCarrel about her colleagues. Some nurses and staff have been working there for decades, resulting in a tight-knit group despite the large size of the team. “Everyone is kind and supportive. We’re all just trying to do the best we can for patients.”
In her view, working within an interprofessional team of healthcare providers is “hugely beneficial for the patients” and builds capacity in the healthcare system. “Our patients love it, and it’s great for us,” she says. With social work, registered dietetics, and clinical pharmacy embedded in the clinic, patients receive the care they need from specialized professionals, freeing up the family physicians so they can see more people.
Where to go when you’re in Waterdown
If you find yourself near Carlisle Medical Centre, Dr. McCarrel recommends visiting the Waterdown outdoor skating loop during the winter, road tripping to Mount Nemo for some hiking and nature, or strolling through the quaint downtown with a stop at The Copper Kettle for lunch.