Several AFHTO member teams were honoured as honour roll applicants for the 2016 Minister's Medals in Health Quality and Safety , announced at today's Health Quality Transformation conference.
About the Minister's Medals and the Honour Roll
The 2016 Minister’s Medal is a competitive, annual program designed to recognize the excellent work that health care providers do every day. The Minister’s Medal provides an opportunity to recognize system champions who place the patient at the centre of the circle of care and have demonstrated exceptional work in collaboration and achieved sustainable results, while promoting system value and quality in the health care system. The teams named below demonstrated outstanding performance across the Medal criteria. Their applications made it to the final stages of the review process and are recognized as honour roll applicants.
Congratulations to the 2016 Recipients
The Carefirst Family Health Team was named to the Team Honour Roll for developing the Seamless/Timely/All-Inclusive/Right-Scaled (STAR) program - a care coordination and integrated hub that enables the Scarborough Hospital to discharge patients to a virtual ward composed of community care services within the community. The Carefirst FHT is partnered with the Scarborough Hospital, the Scarborough Doctors Family Health Organization and the Central East community care access centre to support patient transitions through the program. STAR provides access to home and community care, primary care, chronic disease management, short-stay respite care, and acute care. The Champlain BASE™ eConsult service was named to the Team Honour Roll for Building Access to Specialists through eConsultation. The service, developed by Drs. Clare Liddy and Erin Keely of The Ottawa Hospital Academic Family Health Team is a secure, web-based tool that allows primary care providers quick access to speciality care for their patients, often avoiding the need for the patient to be referred for a face-to-face visit. The eConsult service helps improves timely access to specialists; connects primary care providers and specialists; informs and supports patients, primary care providers and specialists; and protects patients by improving patient safety. Drs. Liddy and Keely were recognized with a 2016 AFHTO Bright Lights Award for this program. Suzanne Singh, a pharmacist with the Mount Sinai Academic Family Health Team, was named to the Individual Champion Honour Roll for being a passionate advocate of optimizing medication management in primary care through collaborative partnerships with patients and health care providers. She steers patient care initiatives focused on vulnerable patient populations at risk of medication-related problems and provides clinical expertise related to managing high-alert medications. She has also chaired the Mount Sinai Academic Family Health Team’s Complex Patient Care Rounds and the Interprofessional Health Provider Committee. One key example of this is her leadership in developing the Brown-Bag Medication Check-Up Program, for which the Mount Sinai Academic FHT won an AFHTO Bright Lights Award in 2015.