When Reg Perkin was a kid, Toronto Township comprised 10,000 people and lots of fruit trees.  In fact, during World War II, he occasionally took a day off from high school to pick fruit.

“Some of the farmers for whom I picked fruit became my patients.”

Dr. Perkin began private practice in 1956 on Dixie Road, eventually building the family practice group that is now Dixie Road Medical Associates.  He was one of the original staff members of Queensway General Hospital when it opened and joined the staff of South Peel Hospital when it opened in 1958.

“The opening of the hospitals made everything possible here,” he says.

Dr. Perkin also taught at the University of Toronto. Working with a small group of other physicians, he brought family medicine into the academic setting, leading to the creation of the Department of Family and Community Medicine in 1969.

During his career as a teacher and a family doctor, he watched the relationship between the family doctor and the patient change whenever hospitalization was required.

“The care of patients has been moving more and more in the direction of consultants because the people being admitted to hospital were more seriously ill.   Family physicians were working under a lot of pressure (and might not be able to participate in hospital care),” he says.

“But when the patient was bounced back to the community, the family doctor was expected to look after him or her in a community setting without the ongoing connection through the hospital stay,”  Dr. Perkin says.

“If you’re really sick and you go into hospital, you lose your best friend if your family doctor doesn’t follow you in.   My work in the hospital was the best continuing education one could acquire because I was working side-by-side with consultants.”

Dr. Perkin is pleased that, today, new patterns of practice, including family health teams, have the potential to move things in the direction of family physician involvement in the hospital care of patients.

“It’s an advantage to the physician and to the patient.”

He believes there has been a shortage of family doctors because a flawed 1990 government study predicted an excess of physicians.  University medical spaces were cut by 10 per cent.

“The people of Canada have been paying ever since,” he says.

He’s in a position to know.

In 1985, he left family practice and teaching to become the Chief Executive Officer of the College of Family Physicians of Canada.  Dr. Perkin retired from the position in 1996.

“I think I was able to do a number of things for the practice of family medicine,” he says,   “thanks to the things I learned as the head of the Department of Family Medicine at Mississauga Hospital from 1967 to 1975.  That experience, plus my university teaching, gave me a platform.”