It will be the luck of the draw that determines who gets in to the new family clinic in Yarmouth.

The Ocean View Family Practice is scheduled to open in March with three family doctors and one mentoring physician. It won't be a walk-in clinic; patients will have to win a random draw.

"This is an attempt to experiment to see if we can solve a very long-standing problem in our district that's growing progressively worse as our current population of physicians begin to retire," said Blaise MacNeil, CEO of the South West Nova District Health Authority.

In a phone survey last fall, about 8,000 people in the district said they didn't have a family doctor. With no one to refill a prescription or check their blood pressure, many turned to busy emergency departments.

Usually it's up to doctors to advertise their practices and patients to phone to get in. But with so many residents without a family physician, health officials wanted to try a lottery to ensure a fair process at the Ocean View clinic.

"This is the only method that we could come up with that seemed to address all of the needs," MacNeil said.

The lottery is only open to people in the health district who don't currently have a family doctor. They have until March 15 to submit an application — one per family.

Each application will be assigned a number, then a computer program will randomly select the winners. On April 7, the district will notify the 1,500 patients chosen.

One resident who has been without a family doctor for almost six years isn't impressed with the idea. Gillian Rowley plans to leave her name out.

"The luck of the draw. Have we come to that point now? It's just terrible," said Rowley, vowing to keep looking for a doctor. "I'm not going to leave it up to fate."

CAPP doctors at Ocean View

The three new doctors who will work at the Ocean View practice are recent graduates of the province's new Clinical Assessment for Practice Program (CAPP), designed to help graduates of foreign medical schools get their credentials.

MacNeil hopes that after 13 months, those doctors move on to establish their own practices and take patients with them, opening Ocean View up to a new group of doctors and patients.

"We're hoping that either way we'll continue to reduce the number of people without a family physician," he said.

Until Ocean View opens, the doctors will work at wellness clinics at the Yarmouth Regional Hospital. These clinics are being set up to give people without a family physician a chance to get a checkup.