Forty medical students at McMaster University got a taste of the diversity of a rural family doctor's life at Groves Memorial Community Hospital on Saturday.

In this small community of 7,000 people north of Guelph, the students had an inside look at the skills a rural doctor needs, to not only work in a hospital with very sick patients but to juggle a variety of other tasks as well.

They have to deliver babies, suture lacerations, insert breathing tubes, analyse heart patients' stress tests, apply casts to broken bones and treat trauma patients in the emergency department, all the while maintaining a solid family medical practice.

The program is designed to recruit family doctors to Fergus, one of many rural communities facing a doctor shortage.

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