Though Dr. John Beamish ran a family practice for more than 40 years, is known as a trailblazer in the palliative care field, was involved in the founding and success of community health initiatives, supports vulnerable communities in retirement, and has been given awards for such work, he continues to remain as humble as ever.
On October 10, Dr. Beamish was a recipient of the 2024 Award of Excellence from the Ontario College of Family Physicians. The provincial accolade “recognizes an exceptional accomplishment or innovation achieved within the past 24 months in a specific area or for a specific project pertaining to the specialty of family medicine.”
“It was very humbling to be nominated by my peers, but I look upon this as not so much a personal award, but a group award,” Dr. Beamish says. “This is an award for creativity for a group of family physicians trying to deliver healthcare to a marginalized group and it’s a tough problem, but this is a creative effort to try and solve that.”
As a family physician, Dr. Beamish provided palliative care to residents in the city and county of Peterborough for more than 40 years before retiring in 2019. One of the founding members of Hospice Peterborough in 1988, he served in many positions before becoming the medical director for the hospice care centre which opened in 2019.
Throughout his career, Dr. Beamish has also supported the founding of the 360 Degree Nurse Practitioner-Led clinic, and has taught family medical residents at Queen’s University Peterborough-Kawartha through the Peterborough Regional Health Centre.
Such work earned him Hospice Palliative Care Ontario’s Dr. S. Lawrence Librach Award for Palliative Medicine in the Community in 2021, as well as the Rotary Club of Peterborough Kawartha’s Paul Harris Fellow award for community service.
But it is the work he has done since retiring from Hospice Peterborough in 2023 that has garnered the most recent recognition. In collaboration with a small group of other physicians, he is helping to establish Peterborough Street Medicine.
Under an alternative payment plan, the initiative aims to deliver primary care services to those in the community who are homeless and underhoused.
“A theme through my whole practice life has been community involvement, and I really believe that primary healthcare is delivered in the community, not in the hospital, and we need to be creative about finding ways to do that,” he says. “This is a group that is not served by traditional model of phoning and making appointments, so we need to come up with a better way to do it.”
Dr. Beamish explains that such a form of care that support those who are marginalized will have a ripple effect across other communities.
“Providing clinics in settings where (unhoused people) are is one way to improve their health and improve the health of the whole community because, if we look after the most marginalized, that leaves room in emergency and within ambulances for the rest of the community to get the care they need,” he explains. “If we can improve the healthcare of one group, we’re going to improve healthcare right through the community.”
Under the proposed model, physicians would be paid hourly rather than by a fee-for-service model, allowing them to work on a part-time basis to supplement other full-time work.
“Young physicians don’t want to be small business owners — they want to come and do medicine,” Dr. Beamish says. “They want to do other aspects of care, and this will be a very attractive model that physicians may come and choose to spend part of their time doing.”
Dr. Beamish suggests the program will add to other recent community successes in reducing barrier access to healthcare, like the Peterborough Newcomer Health Clinic founded in 2023 by family physician Dr. Madura Sundareswaran and the new Peterborough Community Health Centre that will begin seeing clients this fall.
“Peterborough is very innovative when it comes to delivery of primary care,” notes Dr. Beamish. “The more variety of care options we can bring to the community, the more we’re going to be able to attract new primary care physicians which, again, benefits everybody.”
Currently, Dr. Beamish is sitting on the board of the Peterborough Family Health Team as the representative for Peterborough Street Medicine.
“We’re just very, very happy that instead of fully retiring, he has dedicated some of his time to caring for those in shelters with home insecurity, and he’s really dedicating his time to the most vulnerable in our community,” says Duff Sprague, CEO of the Peterborough Family Health Team. “He’s a valued member of our board of directors.”
Despite his retirement, Dr. Beamish shows no sign in slowing down from giving back to the community he both grew up and spent his career working in.
“It’s home,” he says. “I have a great love for the community, and it’s been a real joy to work in.”
