Tag: Highlights

On July 10, 2018 AFHTO’s CEO sent this letter to Ontario’s new Minister of Health and Long-Term Care and Deputy Premier, the Honourable Christine Elliott. Extending our sincerest congratulations on her appointment, she also expressed our desire to work with the government in improving healthcare for all Ontarians. Excerpts include: “As one of your government’s  goals is the promise to address the issue of hospital overcrowding and ending hallway medicine, creating a robust and well resourced primary health care system is a major solution to address this problem.” “AFHTO members already serve 3 million Ontarians, including 900,000 that were previously unattached to primary health care. By limiting the expansion of team-based care Ontario has created disparities in access. This is highly problematic in a universal health care system and, unfortunately, has created a two-tiered primary health care system.” “Primary health care in Ontario has come a long way, but there is a lot more work to do. AFHTO has three key goals which we hope your government will support:

• Ensure every community has access to team-based primary health care.
  • Every patient and every community deserve team-based primary care, not just the 30% currently receiving it. The current system of two-tiered health care is not meeting Ontarians’ needs.
• Support team-based providers in their ongoing efforts to deliver exceptional patient care.
  • FHTs, NPLCs and other interprofessional models of care provide high-quality, team-based care and are always working on improving patient outcomes. Supporting their work will accelerate quality improvement in primary health care.
• Increase the number of patients able to access team-based primary health care that includes mental health supports.
  • Too many families in communities who are served by team-based primary care are unable to access these teams. These communities need existing teams to take on more patients which can only happen if the teams are allowed to grow. Individuals receiving team-based care experience better outcomes and higher rates of patient satisfaction.”

To read the letter in its entirety, click here.

On June 20, 2018 Premier-Designate Doug Ford notified OMA that implementation of changes to the Immunization of School Pupils Act (ISPA) and regulations have been paused. The new reporting requirements would have required family physicians to report immunizations provided to children for nine designated diseases to local public health units starting July 1, 2018. Many providers had expressed concern about how these new reporting requirements would be implemented, and these concerns were shared with the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (MOHLTC) by several organizations. Once a new minister responsible for health has been appointed on June 29, 2018, they will be tasked to work with the OMA to “prioritize an acceptable solution”.  

Kingston Whig-Standard article published June 11, 2018 By Steph Crosier, Kingston Whig-Standard Preventing the problem before it starts was one of the themes at a Monday workshop aimed at creating better strategies for opioid stewardship in Kingston. “Only prescribing it when it is indicated, thinking about some of the downsides, talking about tapering people,” Dr. Fareen Karachiwalla, associate medical officer of health at Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Public Health, said at the event. “The main reason for that is that we know that opioid load in communities is really tied to the number of overdoses, the number of overdose deaths, which is an ongoing problem across Ontario.” The event, hosted at Public Health’s Portsmouth Avenue location, was called the Strategies for Opioid De-Implementation in Primary Care Workshop and featured speakers from Kingston Community Health Care, Canadian Addictions and Mental Health, Queen’s Family Health Team and the Association of Family Health Teams of Ontario. The approximately 45 participants in the workshop were health-care providers from family health teams or community centres, including physicians, social workers, nurse practitioners and pharmacists. “They are all facing the same challenge of how to get people to think really quickly before prescribing an opioid, and how to get some people who are on unsafe doses of opioids to bring down that dose in a safe and thoughtful way,” Karachiwalla said. She pointed out that a large part of the problem with prescribed opioid is linked to the fact that in the 1990s and early 2000s, opioids were heavily marketed to prescribers. Pharmaceutical companies were misleading when it came to side effects of addiction, resulting in minimal awareness for those prescribing the strong painkillers. “So a lot of people who end up misusing opioids or get dependent on them long-term started because of a prescription,” Karachiwalla said. “In the medical field particularly, when people have surgeries or dental procedures, there’s often a large amount of painkillers that are given out, and often those can be diverted or can be misused.” Ironically, opioids aren’t even that effective in treating long-term pain, Karachiwalla explained. “The studies aren’t great, and are more and more showing that [opioids] can actually increase your pain in some ways and reduce your functioning,” Karachiwalla said. “So [the workshop] is about: We’ve gotten so far into this problem, what can providers do in their settings?” Rather than prescribing opioids, the group discussed alternatives to treating chronic pain. “One of the challenges right now in Ontario and many other parts of Canada is that those ancillary pain treatments, things like physio[therapy] and acupuncture and mindfulness, those aren’t as available, and when they are available, they’re often not publicly funded,” Karachiwalla said. “It’s no wonder that this reliance on medication has continued. … “Those alternative treatments are really important, and the government so far has been pretty committed to funding getting more access to chronic pain treatments, but there’s a long way to go still.” Click here to access the Kingston Whig-Standard article