Tuesday, August 29th, 2017 (sent to the leaders of AFHTO member organizations)
AFHTO has had a busy summer of meetings and building partnerships – read a few highlights below:
Meeting with the Ministry’s Primary Health Care Branch
AFHTO met with the Primary Health Care Branch on August 23rd, 2017 to get an update on a few items, including budget approvals, new FTE in teams and Year 2 compensation roll out.
For further meeting details, click here.
Meeting with the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) Negotiations Committee
On July 21st, 2017, AFHTO was invited to a consultation meeting with the OMA Negotiations Committee. Building off our letter of recommendations to the committee, AFHTO was able to engage in further dialogue to help inform the Physicians Services Agreement discussions with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.
Read highlights of the AFHTO presentation to the committee.
Meeting with the Ontario Medical Association Section of General and Family Practice (OMA SGFP) and the Ontario College of Family Physicians (OCFP)
After the meeting with the OMA Negotiations Committee, members of the AFHTO Board, the SGFP Mini-Executive and the OCFP met to further discuss how the three groups can work more collaboratively together. Given our common membership of family physicians, we were really pleased to see alignment around strengthening primary care by ensuring the necessary infrastructure is in place and that there is ongoing expansion of interprofessional team-based care. Joint meetings between the SGFP, OCFP and AFHTO will continue and be fundamental in ensuring family physicians have a strong, unified voice on relevant issues.
Meeting with Health Shared Services Ontario (HSSO)
Under the Patients First Act, Family Health Teams (FHTs) and Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinics (NPLCs) can become Health Services Providers (HSPs), enabling LHINs to fund them (core funding for the FHTs and NPLCs still remains with the Ministry). To fund new HSPs, LHINs will have to establish a formal relationship through the signing of provincial Service Accountability Agreement (SAA). However, these SAAs need to be reviewed and revised to make it more relevant and usable in the primary care sector. We are working with HSSO and the Ministry to develop some education webinars to learn more about what it means to be an HSP and to enter into a SAA and AFHTO will be pushing to be on the provincial SAA Advisory Committee with the LHINs to help inform the development of these agreements. More information about this will be available in the fall.
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