News

August 31 - 6:00 PM - Toronto.  Dr. Benjamin Druss, a specialist in improving the physical health of individuals with serious mental illness will be coming to Toronto on August 31^st, 2011 to do a free evening talk. This talk is focused on individuals working in the primary care field. As the  first Rosalynn Carter Chair in Mental Health at  Emory University, Dr .

Are you, or is someone you know, a Registered Nurse currently practicing or aspiring to practice in a Family Practice/Primary Care setting? If so, you will be interested to know that George Brown College now has a new postgraduate certificate program in Family Practice Nursing for Registered Nurses. Sign up for an information session to find out more about this exciting new program.

Twenty-eight Ontarians who have looked at the inner-workings of the province's health system recommend more collaboration, integration and accountability to help ensure the sustainability of high-quality, accessible and publicly-funded health care. One of these recommendations states, "We urge the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to accelerate the expansion of integrated family health teams throughout the province." The report, released on June 22, 2011, was commissioned by PwC (formerly called PricewaterhouseCoopers).

Are CFHTs different from the wider FHT sector?  Is the difference more than just the governance model?  Now you can find out. The Association of Ontario Health Centres (AOHC) and the Association of Family Health Teams of Ontario (AFHTO) invite FHTs who have physicians on the blended salary model to participate in a research project to determine the complexity of care and the individual characteristics of your patients and how it compares to other primary healthcare models across Ontario.

Four AFHTO members are profiled in two Success Studies found in Quality Monitor 2011 Report on Ontario's Health System, released today:

Family Health Teams are a unique innovation in primary care – there is so much for all of us to learn and to celebrate. Whether you have been a FHT for 5 years or 5 months, you have valuable experiences to share with other FHTs. We invite FHTs to submit abstracts for workshops, oral presentations, or posters you would like to present to your peers on Day 2 of the conference, October 26, 2011.

(New York, N.Y.): A ground-breaking Canadian blood pressure education program will be a powerful tool in fight to reduce stroke around the world. This morning, Dr. Sheldon Tobe, Chair of the Canadian Hypertension Education Program (CHEP) and a long-standing Heart and Stroke Foundation researcher, unveiled a new and powerful tool in the management of hypertension at the American Society of Hypertension (ASH) Scientific Meeting —The Heart&Stroke Hypertension Management Program.

The May 2011 edition of Canadian Family Physician reports on a study of team members in Ontario's FHTs, by Dr. Michelle Howard and others from McMaster University. Click here to access the full report.

Key findings are:

• Interprofessional teamwork, by way of family health teams (FHTs), shows promise as a strategy to facilitate optimal primary health care.

A number of leading experts from Canada and abroad comment on Ontario's experience in setting up Family Health Teams.  The Annals of Family Medicine has published these responses to an article on FHTs in the March 2011 edition of this American journal. The original article had been written for the benefit of Americans trying to come up with models of their own, by a team led by Walter Rosser of Queen's University. This publication was reported by Canadian Press, and the story picked up in a number of Ontario newspapers.