Adam Prudhomme
Editor
In an effort to provide more access to primary health care to its residents, the Town of Greater Napanee has entered a gifting agreement with Kingston Community Health Centres (KCHC).
The two year pact provides $313,476 annually while KCHC assumes operation and governance responsibilities for Greater Napanee Health Home, which will be housed at both the Lenadco building at 310 Bridge St. W and the Napanee Area Community Health Centre at 26 Dundas St. W.
“We have all our healthcare professionals in one building, doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners,” said Greater Napanee mayor Terry Richardson, who was joined by Dr. Kim Morrison, Dr. Tom Touzel and Jordan Beattie – KCHC’s director, regional services and partnerships, at the Lenadco building to announce the partnership. “It’s going to provide the ability for physicians to be physicians. All the administration, the rent is going to absorbed by someone else. What will end up happening is you’ll find some efficiencies because doctors can be doctors as opposed to filling out reports or doing this or doing that and doing something else. We’re hoping, and I’m quite confident that we’ll be able to do it, is the 5,000 people we have unattached (to a family doctor) that we have in our municipality, we’ll be able to find them primary care. That’s the concept and the idea behind it.”
Lack of access to family medicine puts people at a greater risk of having diseases such as cancer that go much longer without being diagnosed or treated. The objective of this partnership is to increase the opportunity to access family medicine for all community members.
The Greater Napanee Health Home will provide more connected care and help with easier access to the care people need. It will be a home base for all the healthcare services needed to achieve the best health. Family physicians, nurse practitioners, nurses and other allied health professionals will work collaboratively as a team to meet the health and wellness needs of the community. Health care professionals can work to the top of their scope of practice, improving capacity and access to primary care. Patients will be attached to the team as a whole and be able to access the right care at the right time by the right person.
“People will come in, they get some help, they get directed either into doctor, a nurse, a nurse practitioner, whoever the most appropriate person is, if they need to see a doctor after they can be referred to a doctor, but they’re going to have the ability to have primary health care,” said Richardson. “The end goal, which I think is very obtainable, is that everybody in our municipality will have access to primary healthcare.”
Providing funding to KCHC will allow the Greater Napanee Health Home to have administrative functions performed by individuals with specialized training. This will allow healthcare providers at the Greater Napanee Health Home to enhance overall efficiency and focus on delivering excellent care.
Along with providing access to care to residents, a team-based approach also makes it easier to recruit healthcare professionals.
“It provides the security to the providers that they can go and take a day off, go on vacation, have a baby, be sick and their patients are being cared for,” said Dr. Morrison, who has been an integral part of the town’s recruitment efforts over the years. “They don’t have to be solely responsible. We’ll share that. That patient doctor, patient nurse practitioner relationship is still super core to comprehensive family medicine. What brings us joy in life is knowing our patients. But, 365 (days a year), it just doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t work for the next group of physicians that are coming and it probably shouldn’t have worked for those that went ahead of me.”
This new agreement will replace the town’s previous $100,000 recruitment incentive program.
“The shift is from investing in an individual physician, which has served us really well, but that’s not enough anymore,” said Dr. Morrison. “As you can see across the province. Now we’re investing in a team. We’re investing in the team and with this investment we’ve been able to create a place that a team can work out of so that we can recruit providers in ways that keeps us ahead of the curve.”
Residents without a primary care provider are encouraged to register through Health Care Connect by phone at 1-800-445-1822 or online. Once registered on Health Care Connect, residents will be added to their local wait-list for a primary care provider. A nurse – the Care Connecter – will be assigned to help find a primary care provider based on each person’s situation. More information on the Greater Napanee Health Home will be available in the coming weeks.