Summer Highlights: AFHTO Leadership Councils

Below are the highlights from the summer 2018 meetings of AFHTO’s Executive Director Advisory Council (EDAC), Physician Leadership Council (PLC), Board Chair Leadership Council (BCLC) and NPLC Leadership Council (NPLC LC).

Governance Tools Coming Soon!

Based on the needs identified by our newly formed Board Chair Leadership Council, the following governance items are on their way:

• Lead Executive Performance Guide – offering boards a simple and straightforward process to follow when conducting the annual performance evaluation for their Lead Executive. (Available Nov 5, 2018)
• Provincial Primary Care Policies and Procedures Manual – a standardised provincial document that teams can leverage internally to help with policy development, or externally to support non-affiliated physicians in their communities. (Available Oct 30, 2018)
• Raising the Bar on Governance: Webcast Series – Monthly governance webinars over the next six months for boards and EDs – sign up now! All webinars and links for registration are in the Bits & Pieces that was sent to members on September 18. Click here to register for them.
• Skills-based board toolkit – available online to help teams meet new ministry requirements under the FHT contract.
• GCE board self-assessment tool (Governance Centre of Excellence) – the 2018 assessment questionnaire is now available. Contact Bryn Hamilton for a group rate.
• Shared Care Model Agreement – is your team expanding care to patients of unaffiliated physicians? This document can help you better outline the partnership and mitigate risk for all parties involved. (Available Oct/Nov 2018)
• Collaborative Governance Case Study – An in-depth look at how two teams approached collaborative governance, including drivers, goals and lessons learned. (Available late October)

Leadership training continues

• Over 120 members have participated to date in LeaderShift, Leadership LITE, or JOULE for physician leaders!
• LeaderShift 2019 opportunities will be announced shortly, and the third LITE and JOULE cohorts may also be announced soon, budget depending.

Members’ priorities for improvement

• We’re doing more to demonstrate the value of primary care teams! Changes coming to D2D in the fall of 2019 include:
  • More focus on local team-specific data.
  • Highlight a single indicator as an area for all teams to achieve high performance.
  • Forum for teams to report on improvement efforts (vs just performance) for locally-chosen indicators.
• Teams continue to be encouraged to unmask their D2D data. When you know who in your neighbourhood has great performance, it is easier to call and learn from them.
• We have an opportunity to partner with researchers at Queen’s University, who will help us dig into the D2D data to identify characteristics that enable high performance or improvement on certain indicators. There is also a chance for us to share in the research funding to help make D2D even better. In D2D 6.0, we asked teams for consent to share their D2D data with our research partners, anonymously. Teams that were not yet ready to say “yes” during the D2D data-submission period, can still say “yes” now. Please contact Catherine Macdonald for more information.
• Keep measuring so we can keep improving! This is critical to show our value to a new government.

Measuring what matters to patients

• A survey about Patient Perceptions of Patient-Centredness (PPPC) could help teams know how patient-centered their patients feel the team is; it will give patients a break from the same old survey; and it will help AFHTO staff further calibrate the quality composite measure in D2D to make it an even better reflection of what matters to patients.
• The PPPC is a formal, tested scale. The teams that received LEAN and academic detailing training already did this. You can speak with them or get more detail from Laura Belsito.

Advocacy with your MPP

• There are many new MPPs in the legislature; it is important to establish a relationship and to communicate the value of team-based care for their constituents. Even if your MPP is not new, continuing to build the relationship is important.
• The material from the spring election is still helpful to use, and additional support material is being sent to EDs though their EDAC rep for teams to use, if needed, when arranging a meeting.
• For any other support or questions, please contact your EDAC rep or Beth MacKinnon.

The annual conference is just over a month away!

• Don’t forget about the fast-approaching early bird deadline of October 1! On October 2, rates will increase for both members and non-members.
• More information and registration are here.

Primary Health Care Branch

We know the new government has brought some uncertainties to the field, so we brought forward some of your questions to our recent ministry meeting. Here’s what we know:

• Until the line-by-line audit of public sector spending is completed and reviewed (they expect December at the earliest), the priorities of government remain unknown.
• The 3-year recruitment & retention funding approved by the former government remains on the books as committed spending.
• No FHT/NPLC claw-backs have been announced.
• Work to develop a Primary Care Multi-Sector Accountability Agreement (M-SAA), so teams can receive one-time or project funding directly from the LHINs is continuing. Our legal and LHIN legal are working to resolve the current misalignments between the M-SAA and FHT-Ministry contract.
• Over the coming months, it is crucial to establish relations – both provincially and locally – with government officials. We need to ensure that comprehensive primary care is on their radar, demonstrate our value, and identify how many of the solutions to current healthcare challenges (i.e., hallway medicine) lie within primary care.

Any further questions or comments, please contact Bryn Hamilton, Provincial Lead for the Governance & Leadership program.