Updated March 26, 2020
Resource includes:
Updated March 26, 2020
Resource includes:
Excerpt from CBC News, published December 10, 2019
By Jennifer Lee
This article examines three family health teams (FHTs) in different Ontario communities that exemplify the features of a Patient's Medical Home (PMH), a vision developed by the College of Family Physicians of Canada. With PMH supports and foundations in place, these FHTs deliver high-quality care enabled by strong PMH functions: accessible, comprehensive, patient- and family-centred continuous care that is responsive to a community's unique needs. Adhering to PMH principles not only improves patient experience, health outcomes and provider satisfaction but also leads to fewer unnecessary hospital admissions and emergency room visits – system savings and better use of public resources.
Featured FHTs:
Marathon FHT's High-Yield Approach to Risk Mitigation and Safety (HARMS): A program for safer opioid prescribing through systematic risk stratification and urine drug testing
Markham FHT's Eating Disorders Bridge Program
Peterborough FHT: New services improve primary care access to an underserviced region
Authors
Join CMHA, AMHO, and AFHTO for a 2ND of a 4-part webinar series on community and primary care QI projects and initiatives with a focus on mental health and addiction.
In preparation for Ontario Health Teams, learn about opportunities for collaboration with your local mental health and addiction agencies and how to implement quality improvement initiatives.
Presenters:
AFHTO congratulates physicians in our member family health teams who were recognized on Thursday, November 28, 2019 at the Ontario College of Family Physicians (OCFP) 2019 Awards Ceremony.
Dr. Jocelyn Charles of Sunnybrook Academic FHT, named 2019 Reg. L Perkin Ontario Family Physician of the Year.
The current healthcare landscape poses pressure to modernize health care delivery, striving for an integrated, higher-quality patient-centred model. Digital health tools, when designed, deployed and maintained to meet user needs, play an important role in enhancing patient and provider experience, and unlocking opportunities for a greater understanding of patient population and the delivery of proactive care, while optimizing the use of resources.
The chances of a patient with a serious mental illness ending up in hospital because of their condition are reduced by almost 40 per cent if they have a care plan, according to the research.
The study, which tracked 20,000 patients with a severe mental illness through the healthcare system, also found that seeing the same GP reduced the risk of an unplanned hospital admission by around 25 per cent.
Professional communication networks — described by researchers as “face-to-face interaction about patient care among the health care professionals in a primary care team” — may improve job satisfaction, according to survey results published in Annals of Family Medicine.