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CTVNews.ca article published January 11, 2017. Article in full pasted below. CTVNews.ca Staff A doctor who was praised for her calm defence of universal healthcare when she spoke before a powerful group of U.S. politicians in 2014 has written a new book outlining her vision for improving the quality of Canada’s health care system. Nearly three years ago, Dr. Danielle Martin made international headlines after calmly and succinctly defending universal care when she testified at U.S. Senate sub-committee hearing examining Obamacare. Video of her testimony went viral on YouTube, with more than 1.4 million views. Martin has since been named one of Canada’s most powerful doctors by The Medical Post. With her new book, “Better Now: Six Big Ideas to Improve Health Care for All Canadians,” Martin is on a mission to bolster health care and reduce wait times across the country. The six ideas outlined in Martin’s book are:

1. Ensure every Canadian has regular access to a family doctor or other primary care provider
2. Bring prescription drugs under medicare
3. Reduce unnecessary tests and interventions
4. Recognize health care delivery to reduce wait times and improve quality
5. Implement a basic income guarantee to alleviate poverty, which is a major threat to health
6. Scale up successful local innovations to a national level

“I’m a family doctor working in the system every day, so I see the challenges and the cracks that my patients experience as they work their way through the system,” Martin said on CTV’s Your Morning Wednesday. “But I think we’ve been stuck in a conversation about, ‘is the system good or is it bad? Is medicare worth preserving or do we just get rid of it?’ “And I think that that has stopped us from really focusing on the conversation we should be having which is, ‘How do we make it better?’” One of Martin’s ideas is ensuring that every Canadian has regular access to a family doctor or other primary care provider. The difficulty in getting a doctor’s appointment in a timely fashion, she said, has spurred the “rise” of the use of walk-in clinics, “where people are getting convenient access to care but not necessarily the kind of relationship-based health care that we know is really the best things for our health.” In addition, she said there must be better communication between family physicians and the rest of the health-care system. “I was in my office yesterday, and I discovered that a patient of mine had been admitted to the hospital who had a heart attack in a hospital just a few blocks from my office, but she had already been discharged and gone home and I had no idea that she had ever been in the hospital,” Martin said. “So we need to improve that communication.” Solution for wait times? Martin said she wants to push back against the presumption that more is always better when it comes to health care. To reduce wait times, Martin suggests in her book that rather than surgeons keeping their own wait list, they should come together to create a shared list. In that scenario, a patient would be referred to a centralized list and then seen by the next available doctor. Martin said a centralized wait list wouldn’t require more money – just a different way of thinking. Creating “team-based” care that involves not only doctors but nurse practitioners, dietitians, physiotherapists and other health-care workers would also help the system because it would improve access to care, reduce wait times and be less costly for the system overall, Martin said. “In fact, sometimes a doctor is not the best person for you to see.” Unnecessary tests and interventions are also clogging up the system. “We know for example, that almost one in three medical imaging procedures, whether it X-ray, MRI, CT (scan), ultrasound contributes no useful information to the management of that person’s case,” Martin said. Everyone should have access to such tests, “but if it’s not going to improve your health, or perhaps even harm you, we shouldn’t be doing it.” Watch the video to learn about Martin’s ideas to bolster Canada’s health-care system. Click here to access the CTVNews.ca article.

Windsor Star article published January 5, 2017. Article in full pasted below. Brian Cross, Windsor Star Windsor Regional Hospital’s two emergencies are getting fewer patients with sore throats and other minor ailments, an encouraging trend that started once the hospital began sharing patient discharge information with the Windsor Family Health Team. The health team — which provides primary care (family doctoring) to 6,400 patients in Windsor, not including the 10,000 students and staff it serves at St. Clair College — uses this daily information to identify ways it can better serve its patients. For example, when the team finds out a patient is being discharged after a hospital stay, the patient can be contacted for a followup appointment with his doctor. That continuing care translates into better care outside the hospital and fewer readmissions. And when health team patients use the emergency for minor problems, the data can show why they chose the emergency instead of the health team. Since the data sharing began in 2014, the health team has expanded and revamped its after-hour coverage, so urgent cases can be seen the same day or the next day. From 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Monday to Friday, a health team doctor sees only urgent cases. Since 2013, the health team’s rate of emergency department visits for less severe ailments has dropped from 172.2 per 1,000 patients annually to 110.2, a 36 per cent decline. And its rate of hospital admissions for such conditions as asthma, congestive heart failure, COPD (lung disease) and diabetes has gone from 3.8 per 1,000 to 2.6, a 32 per cent decline.

The numbers add up to hundreds of fewer hospital visits, said Mark Ferrari, the health team’s executive director. The data, he said, “just gives us an idea of who we need to be proactive, to reach out to … to give them followup care.” He noted that when patients are served at the health team instead of the hospital, the result is big cost savings and shorter waits for people who need acute care at the hospital. The health team is focusing on ailments that rank as 4s or 5s on the five-level Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale, in which the most severe cases are rated as 1s and the least severe are 5s. “These are things where you don’t necessarily need to be triaged in a hospital emergency,” said Ferrari. “That’s why we focus on those 4s and 5s because it could be anything. It could be a sore throat, suture removals, back pain, the flu, vomiting — all those things that are considered less urgent.” Up until three years ago, emergency department visits were increasing annually at Windsor Regional. But in the last two years, the number of visits has dropped by 4,000, to 120,000 a year, due solely to the decline in 4s and 5s, said vice-president Ralph Nicoletti. “And certainly the family health team is a factor,” he said, also crediting the addition in recent years of more walk-in clinics in Windsor. Though the drop in 4s and 5s is helpful, he added the hospital continues to see a significant number of patients coming in who are “very, very sick right now.” Nicoletti said the situation is changing toward what the hospital envisions for the future, when a single acute hospital with an emergency department will replace Windsor Regional’s two current locations, and an urgent-care centre located at the former Grace Hospital site will serve the less acute patients. The health team is actually planning to move into the same building once the urgent care centre is built, further reducing the need for its patients to go to the emergency.

The health team, which pays its doctors a salary, has openings for about 250 more patients and is looking to hire a fifth doctor, which would add up to 1,650 more spaces. Located at 2475 McDougall Ave., it uses a team of medical professionals to manage and prevent disease, and promote good health.

Click here to access the Windsor Star article 

Dundas Star News article published January 4, 2017. Article in full pasted below. Craig Campbell, Dundas Star News