Saugeen Shores is supporting local doctors who want to create a family health team with Kincardine.
The town recently talked to the representatives from Ontario’s Ministry of Health at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario Conference (AMO).
The annual event is seen as a chance for local government representatives to seek funding and support for their initiatives back home.
“We’re always in need of more primary care providers,” says Saugeen Shores Mayor Luke Charbonneau.
He adds, “We have been going to these conferences fro a long time, asking the province to support us in different ways to try to fill that gap, and this is another approach that we have, asking the province to assist us with establishing a family health team.”
Saugeen Shores Manager of Strategic Initiatives Jill Roote says, last June, (2023) the Ministry of Health put a call out asking for expressions of interest for primary care. Roote says the physicians in the Saugeen Shores Medical Building in Southampton joined the Kincardine Family Health Team’s expression of interest for the submission for the Ministry of Health.
Roote says the outcome they were hoping for, was support for the creation of a joint Saugeen Shores-Kincardine family health team, but the application was not supported by the provincial government last year.
This year, Saugeen Shores made a delegation at the AMO conference on behalf of those physicians with the hope of being successful when another round of funding becomes available.
“It was really on behalf of the physicians because they took the lead in working with the Kincardine Family Health Team to submit the expression of interest.” says Roote.
She explains, a family health team is an approach to primary care health that brings together healthcare providers to deliver and co-coordinate what they call comprehensive primary care for patients. They are usually made up of a team of family physicians, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, social workers, dieticians and other professionals that could include psychologists, respiratory therapists, occupational therapists etc.
Roote says family health teams allow for a more coordinated approach to health promotion, disease prevention and chronic disease management.
She notes, the communities that did get funding last year had more people without doctors in them, but Roote says, Saugeen Shores and Kincardine are growing rapidly and are projected to grow more.
“We’re really lucky to have the physicians we do in our community but they are looking at the current landscape and they’re also looking to the future. We are growing. We know we’re going to need more family physicians, we can’t just rest on our laurels on the number of docs we have right now,” says Roote.
She adds, “This is a model that, it seems, family physicians really like, and so it’s also kind of a recruitment and retention tool as well.”
Roote says if they were to roughly estimate each physician has 800 to 1,000 patients, the Town is projecting in its recruitment work with Kincardine and Bruce Power they would like to bring in a couple of physicians each year, for a total of 12 in emergency departments and ten family physicians in clinics by 2032.