LeaderShift is thrilled to announce the launch of the Applied Leadership E-Learning Series. This online series will feature short, laser-focused learning on key leadership topics that will give you practical, actionable insights you can use right away. The first topic in this series will be “How to Give Better Feedback.” High-performing teams rely on effective, insightful feedback delivered the right way, at the right times, to keep them at their best. Learn how to optimize feedback, motivate your team and colleagues, and overcome barriers in the upcoming online delivery of “How to Give Better Feedback.” Learn more today about this interactive online session and how to connect with leaders from across community and primary health care. Seats to participate live are limited. Apply before Friday, November 16th! Also, stay tuned to the website over the coming weeks for a key announcement related to an online LEADS LITE Series. It’s coming soon!
Blog
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Collaborative Governance Case Studies: How Collaborative Are You?
Collaborative governance is simply multiple boards partnering together to collectively achieve results for shared communities and/or stakeholders.
Read these case studies to learn how two FHTs took a differing approach to collaborative governance, and learn where your board falls on the spectrum of collaboration.
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Provincial Policy Manual for Primary Care Teams and Practices
We are pleased to share the Provincial Policy Manual developed for primary care.
The policy templates can be used by primary care teams across the province or by other primary care practices (solo physicians and non-team based clinics). The manual gives you the flexibility to determine, for your own practice or setting, what policies are required, and whether/how they should be tailored for your unique circumstances. To be effective, policies should be reviewed on a regular basis (e.g. every 2 to 3 years) to ensure that they continue to be compliant with legislation, and to assess whether they are achieving their stated goal.
AFHTO will be updating policies in this manual annually. Although all the policy templates in the manual have been reviewed by legal and HR expertise, users should consult with their own legal counsel for advice pertaining to the use of these policies.
We would like to thank the Partnering for Quality Program for its contribution to the development of this policy manual, with special thanks to Clinton FHT, West Durham FHT and Thames Valley FHT. The Partnering for Quality Program is a regional program in the South West LHIN that aims to improve information management and collaboration between primary care and community health care partners with the ultimate goal of improving chronic disease prevention.
Looking for more Governance and Leadership Tools & Resources? Click here to explore more.
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Data to Decisions eBulletin #81: Sharpening our focus
Halloween is done. Conference 2018 is done. It’s time to get back to demonstrating the value of the work primary care teams do every day! Based on member input, AFHTO’s board chose ‘follow-up after hospitalization” as a priority for improvement across the membership for the coming year. This bulletin highlights activities that might help in that regard. Focus on Follow-Up in the North East: Scared of having your patients fall through the cracks? Join us in Sudbury on November 27th for a full-day, interprofessional workshop for teams (and hospital partners) in the North East LHIN.
- Focus on Follow-Up will help your team make concrete progress in three areas: getting hospitalization information, tracking follow-up in EMRs, and doing the follow-up in a patient-centered way.
- As always, we’ll be highlighting the wisdom of the field, so you’ll hear what’s already working for your peers in the North East, and how you can do it in your team.
- Learn more, or go straight to registration!
Patient Oriented Discharge Summaries (PODS): It’s been a year! It’s time to check in about how well they’re working and why. The PODS research team is sponsoring the upcoming Focus on Follow-up session for AFHTO members (see above). Please help thank them by giving them 3 minutes of your time to complete a post-implementation survey of primary care teams. Sound familiar, but you’re not quite sure? Read on …
- The questionnaire asks whether you’re sharing PODS with patients who go into hospital and/or getting them from patients when they come out of hospital. It also asks whether your team finds PODS helpful when it comes to doing follow-up.
- PODS, introduced in 2017, are a tool that can help your patients get the information they need when they leave hospital. Twenty-seven hospitals across Ontario are giving PODS to patients at discharge.
- Think you’ve seen this survey before? You may have done the original, baseline survey when PODS were first implemented. That survey helped the research team understand the potential value of PODS for primary care. This follow-up survey (see what we did there?) will help the measure the outcome of the intervention.
Use your Schedule A to help track progress with follow-up (among other things): Follow the North Star to make your Schedule A more useful tool. Or consider reviewing the Program Performance Measures Catalogue (PPMC) to find more meaningful and consistent measures for your Schedule A. More consistency shows measurement maturity, further demonstrating the value of teams to the MOHLTC. If you’re not ready to redesign your Schedule A yet, maybe you would consider at least sharing the current version of your Schedule A. This will help us update the catalogue and make it more useful.
- More information on PPMC: Here’s an introduction to the tool and how other teams are using it. And check out the quick reference guide for a cheat-sheet that will help you navigate it. You may also want to consider using program-planning and evaluation tools developed with and for AFHTO members.
Congratulations to everyone who presented at the AFHTO 2018 conference! We’re especially proud to toot the horn of our QI professionals – QIDS Specialists, QIIMS, and other QIDSS-like folks, now collectively known as the Q. Missed their presentations? Check out the links below. You may want to borrow some of their ideas for your own measurement and quality improvement work.
- Improving Quality Together
- Stop banging your head against a wall: how to measure, discuss, and improve timely access to team-based primary care
- Team-Based Transition Management – A Hospital Discharge Follow-Up Process
- The North Star – Leading the Way in Collective Action
- Thinking outside the box: Applying Lean tools in primary care
- When Things Aren’t Adding Up, Start Subtracting! De-Prescribing Sedative-Hypnotics
- Working together: A multi-organizational partnership to support pain management and opioid prescribing in primary care teams
For these slides and more, visit our website here.
In Case You Missed It: Check out eBulletin #80 or other back issues here!
Questions? Comments? Connect with the QIDS team at improve@afhto.ca.
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Bits & Pieces: conference resources, members recognised, partnering with unaffiliated physicians, & more
Your Weekly News & Updates
AFHTO 2018 conference resources
Over 800 people took part in the AFHTO 2018 Conference, Relationship Design with Starfield in Mind. As members, even if you couldn’t attend, you still get access to quite a few related resources:
- Winners from the AFHTO 2018 Bright Lights Awards
- Slide presentations from the concurrent sessions
- Online gallery of posters presented at the conference
- Slides from Leadership Triad Session
If you did attend, and didn’t get a chance to do so, please submit your conference evaluation.
Fill it out by Tuesday, Nov. 6 to receive a custom reading list, courtesy of Longwoods.
HQO recognises AFHTO members for abstracts/posters of distinction
Each year, the top scoring abstracts and posters at Health Quality Transformation are recognized with a Distinction Award. Several members received awards, including:
- Belleville NPLC – ““They’re Looking at me as a Whole Piece, not Just Fixing a Part of me”: Innovative Ways to Managing and Mitigating Low Back Pain and Opioid Use at the Belleville NPLC Primary Care Low Back Pain Pilot” in the category “Support Innovation and Spread of Knowledge.”
- Maple FHT– “Primary Care Health Link Coordination/System Navigation Experiences” and it was in the category “Help Professionals and Caregivers to Thrive.”
- Greater Peterborough FHO, Peterborough FHT– “Utilizing Full Scope Nursing to Improve Primary Care Access and Reduce Unnecessary ER Visits,” in the category “Monitor Performance with Quality in Mind. They went on to win a Bright Lights award for this last week as well.
The full list can be found here.
Reminder: upcoming governance and management webcasts ED performance management
To assist FHT boards with their fiduciary duty to regularly measure and assess the performance of the lead executive of the organization, a Performance Assessment Guide has been developed by Accompass. This optional guideline provides FHT boards with a simple and straightforward process to follow when conducting the annual performance evaluation for their lead executive. The related webinar is on Monday, Nov. 5, from 12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Register here.
Ontario Internal Responsibility System (IRS) and Workplace Violence Prevention Initiative
On Nov. 14, join us from 12 noon to 1 p.m. for a joint Ministry of Labour & Public Services Health and Safety Association (PSHSA) presentation. This initiative is to promote compliance with the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) and its regulations. We’ll discuss how this may affect your workplace and what support resources are available to ensure you’re in compliance. Register here.
Board orientation and education
On Dec. 6, join us from 12 noon to 1:30 p.m. We’ll have an overview of why this is important, discuss lead practices and tools, and review sample resources to help boards excel. Register here.
Spreading access to team-based care – partnership letter Many teams are building relationships with unaffiliated physicians to offer access to team based programs and services and to better meet the health needs of the communities they serve. The new “Model of Shared Care” letter can be used by teams and their unaffiliated physicians to outline the partnership, set expectations and define the commitment to work together. The letter and more information are here.
Internet-delivered CBT for major depression and anxiety In partnership with the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health, Health Quality Ontario is drafting a health technology assessment on internet-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy for major depression and anxiety disorders. They are looking for feedback on the draft assessment by Nov. 6, 2018, at 11:59 PM. Draft recommendation: Health Quality Ontario, under the guidance of the Ontario Health Technology Advisory Committee, recommends publicly funding guided internet-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy for mild to moderate major depression and anxiety disorders.
Mental Health Across the Lifespan: Social Workers on the Front Line of Real Issues, Nov. 2 & 3, 2018 Participate in the OSAW biannual conference focused on mental health. Learn more here.
Focus on Follow-up, Nov. 27, 2018 A full-day, interprofessional workshop highlighting northern teams and their solutions on how they can help their patients get the right follow-up from the right providers at the right time. Learn more here.
Wound Care for Primary Practitioners, Nov. 11, 2018
An interactive educational program catered towards primary practitioners. Learn more here.
Altering Challenging Behaviours In Persons With ABI, Nov. 14, 2018
Acquired Brain Injury Behaviour Services at Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation presents this full-day Toronto workshop. You can register here.
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Expanding Access to Team-based Care – Partnership Letter
Many teams are building relationships with unaffiliated physicians to offer access to team based programs and services and to better meet the health needs of the communities they serve. The following “Model of Shared Care” letter can be used by teams and their unaffiliated physicians to outline the partnership, set expectations and define the commitment to work together.
Teams can modify or fine tune the letter depending on their needs and circumstances of the relationship.
Included in the letter is a template agreement for “Personal Health Information and Electronic Medical Record Access.” This is to identify obligations and restrictions when it comes to EMR access for a shared care patients.
Use of these tools is optional and intended to support collaborations between teams and independent practitioners, and to affirm both parties as valuable partners in care.
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Fundamentals of Governance Toolkit
AFHTO’s Fundamentals of Governance is intended to provide the boards of Family Health Teams and Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinics with essential, basic information that will help them to become high performing boards and organizations. The material can be used as:
- An introduction to governance for new board members
- A refresher and ongoing education resource for all board members
- A guide to assess whether your board is using leading governance practice and identify opportunities for improvement
- A valuable source of sample policies, position descriptions, assessment tools and other resources to help boards fulfill their governance role.
This resource covers all the elements of the governance attestation.
How to use these materials
To access the guidebook, please click on the following link
To access the accompanying tools (samples and templates), videos, and resources, please click on the following links:
- Fundamentals of Governance – Tools and Templates
- Fundamentals of Governance – Videos
- Fundamentals of Governance – Resources
If you have any questions about AFHTO’s Fundamentals of Governance, please contact info@afhto.ca
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2018 Concurrent Sessions Slides & Materials
Thank you to all of our concurrent session presenters who came to the AFHTO 2018 conference. Please see below for the uploaded concurrent session slides. Our concurrent session presentations are organized into 45-minute timeslots and six themes. We have arranged the sessions by timeslot and theme in the table below.
[table id=105 /]
Concurrent Session Selection
Concurrent session presentations were chosen by working groups consisting of AFHTO members across Ontario, representing the full breadth of professions within collaborative primary care. Submissions were chosen for reflecting the conference theme, usefulness/applicability to interprofessional primary care teams, innovativeness, evidence of impact, and clear learning objectives.
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2018 Concurrent Sessions Slides & Materials
Thank you to all of our concurrent session presenters who came to the AFHTO 2018 conference. Please see below for the uploaded concurrent session slides. Our concurrent session presentations are organized into 45-minute timeslots and six themes. We have arranged the sessions by timeslot and theme in the table below.
Concurrent Session Selection
Concurrent session presentations were chosen by working groups consisting of AFHTO members across Ontario, representing the full breadth of professions within collaborative primary care. Submissions were chosen for reflecting the conference theme, usefulness/applicability to interprofessional primary care teams, innovativeness, evidence of impact, and clear learning objectives.
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2018 Poster Gallery
Thank you to all of our poster presenters who came to the AFHTO 2018 conference. Posters were submitted by interprofessional health teams across the province. Like the concurrent session presentations, they represent the full breadth of professions within collaborative primary care and showcase evidence-based, impactful innovations that will be useful to other teams.
2018 Posters Displays