There’s a version of this story that gets told in statistics. More than 400 American healthcare professionals have relocated to British Columbia in the past year. About 100 of them are now working somewhere on Vancouver Island.
On June 1st, 2022, an active shooter entered the hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma where Anne worked as a pathologist. He killed two doctors, a patient, and a receptionist before taking his own life. Anne was in the building, watching from a window as more than fifty emergency vehicles converged outside, with no idea where the shooter was. That evening she went home and told her husband they had to leave the United States. The next day — the very next day — she started searching job listings and found a posting on Vancouver Island.
That detail – the next day – hit me differently. Not because it was impulsive. Anne had been thinking about leaving for years. Oklahoma felt politically and socially unfriendly. Healthcare in the US, she explained to me, isn’t the universal access system that many Canadians assume it is. “The only place that has to treat you is the ER,” she said. “Otherwise, you can absolutely be turned away from anywhere else if you can’t pay.”
Two and a half years of red tape, immigration hurdles, and Royal College registration windows later, she stepped off a BC Ferries sailing in September 2025. She told me that the ferry crossing was the moment it hit her. She and her ten-year-old daughter were practically jumping up and down with excitement. Three dogs on the deck with them — a greyhound, a whippet, and a fluffy little one — drawing people over for conversations that weren’t just pleasantries. “It just felt so Canadian,” she said, obviously delighted by it.
She’s now a pathologist at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital, doing the work she’s always done — turning biopsies into diagnoses, guiding oncologists, being, as she put it, “the doctor’s doctor.” She loves it here. Her daughter loves it here. Her introverted husband, she laughed, has somehow become someone who regularly goes out and finds people to spend time with. “Something about this place just makes it easy to talk to people.”
She also told me she hears from American doctors and nurses every week — people who want to know how she did it, whether it’s possible, what the process looks like. She feels obligated to reach back and help them.
One pathologist friend is interviewing for a Campbell River position.
Hear the full conversation with Dr. Anne Herdman Royal on The PULSE Community Podcast at: https://bit.ly/S2EP29PulsePodcast
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca.
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/