Calgary medical clinic whittles down waitlist with unique spin on team-based care
CBC
A Calgary medical clinic is working to tackle the shortage of family physicians by empowering other health-care providers to play key roles in patient care.
Faced with a waitlist of thousands of people, the Crowfoot Village Family Practice (CVFP) recently launched the Rainbow Project, a team of publicly funded health providers caring for patients who don't have a family doctor.
"We are not going to hire enough physicians to provide the care we need in our health system," said Shauna Thome, executive director of CVFP.
The Rainbow Project is designed to eliminate a bottleneck in the system by bypassing the need for patients to see a family doctor to access care.
"Every day I see patients in my office who are begging me to help relatives or friends or neighbours find a family doctor," said Dr. Rick Ward, a family physician and senior partner at the Crowfoot clinic.
"Some of the stories are really heartbreaking."
Crowfoot Village Family Practice, which operates under an alternative funding model, has had multidisciplinary teams in place for years.
And while it had already moved away from the traditional doctor-patient relationship by providing a variety of health providers, physicians were still acting as the guardians of those teams.
"Even in our clinic the barrier to care has been the family physician. Accessing the team had to happen first by seeing the family physician," said Ward.
That's changing.
The Rainbow Project includes registered nurses, a health navigator, a physician assistant and a family physician supporting the team.
"The nurses have taken a care-lead approach," said Jordan McPhee, a registered nurse on the team.
"We are able to assess and triage patients for a variety of different things and try and help create that care plan with them without necessarily having to book them with a physician."
Each day starts with a morning huddle, where team members meet up, with laptops in hand, and discuss the day's patients and how best to approach them.
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