Tag: Highlights

Niagara Advance article published November 3, 2017. Article in full pasted below. Penny Coles, Niagara Advance Cooking classes at the Niagara-on-the-Lake community centre are bringing youth and seniors together to learn about healthy meals. Let’s Cook Together is a continuation of a successful program that took place last year at the community centre, paid for by a provincial grant for seniors. It’s being repeated this year, free of charge thanks to funding by the Healthy Kids Community Challenge, with an inter-generational component. The program offers four weeks of cooking classes, Thursdays from 4 to 6 p.m. The theme of the current program, which wraps up next week, is Boost your Fruits and Vegetables, which teaches and encourages participants to include produce as part of their daily meal plan, says Nicole McDougall, program facilitator and dietician with the local family health team. A new session begins Nov. 16 and runs until Dec. 7. Dan Maksenuk, community centre co-ordinator, says the class has 18 regulars registered this session, pretty evenly divided but with a few more young people that seniors. “It’s been very successful,” he said. “With the combination of kids and seniors, you can see them learning from each other. The seniors help the young people cut and prepare food, and the kids help the seniors with technology.” The recipes contain lots of whole grains, legumes and lean protein sources for a balanced meal, McDougall says, and any leftovers from the class are taken home by participants, along with copies of the recipes. Support is provided by the family health team and Niagara Region Public Health community food advisors. To register call 905-468-4386 or visit www.notl.org. Click here to access the Niagara Advance article.

The Sarnia Journal article published October 29, 2017. Article in full pasted below. Troy Shantz, The Sarnia Journal The numbers are staggering. Last year, 1,326 residents of Sarnia-Lambton were prescribed an opioid for pain. That’s one in six. Another 1,326 people — one in every 93 people living in Sarnia-Lambton — were treated for an addiction to opiates with prescribed methadone or suboxone. Forty-seven people were hospitalized for opioid poisoning, five died, and 48 babies were hospitalized for maternal drug addiction in 2016, according to Lambton Public Health. “Some of the stats were just amazing,” said Lynn Laidler, the executive director of Rapids Family Health Team. “We didn’t realize how high they were.” In response, a committee began looking at ways the community could reduce drug abuse this summer. It had people from Rapids, Bluewater Health, Lambton Public Health, the city and Sarnia Police. A couple of weeks ago, representatives from more than 20 agencies met in a brainstorming session to discuss the creation of a Lambton County Drug Strategy. Laidler said better communication between agencies and with the wider community was identified as one priority. Social media will be used, and some agencies are willing to combine budgets and staff to make it happen, she said. At Bluewater Health, addiction treatment staff have seen a 300% increase in demand for service since 2014. The hospital recently announced it is getting $445,000 to create an eight-bed addiction treatment unit, which could be open as soon as January. The unit is regarded as a stopgap measure until a 24-bed facility with fully integrated drug treatment program can be opened in Sarnia. “We have a lot of good things, but we can always do more,” said Laidlaw. The group of agencies plans to meet again Nov. 23 with the goal of announcing at least two directives. Click here to access the The Sarnia Journal article. Relevant link:

• Blackburn News – Oct. 19, 2017

The Manitoulin Expositor article published October 20, 2017. Article in full pasted below. Expositor Staff, The Manitoulin Expositor MINDEMOYA—A Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) faculty member who works at the Manitoulin Central Family Health Team and Manitoulin Health Centre in Mindemoya, Dr. Frances Kilbertus, is among six distinguished educators to receive a 2017 Associated Medical Services (AMS) Phoenix Fellowship. Dr. Kilbertus, NOSM associate professor, and Dr. James Goertzen, NOSM assistant dean, continuing education and professional development, are among six distinguished educators to receive the award. Dr. Kilbertus is focusing her Fellowship on projects that explore how the community, the workplace, health professionals and learners are interwoven in a process of learning and practicing palliative care in the culturally diverse rural community on Manitoulin Island. “The focus for the first year of the fellowship will be exploring community involvement, creating opportunities for engagement and dialogue around death and dying, and developing learning tools for palliative care that are inclusive of an Indigenous perspective,” Dr. Kilbertus says. “The second year will focus on the rural clinical workplace; how learners and practitioners understand and appreciate palliative care and how compassionate learning environments are created and sustained.” The Fellowship from AMS Healthcare is awarded each year and specifically targets individuals with strong leadership abilities who are committed to nurturing and sustaining the learning and practice of compassionate care. The intent of the Fellowship is to provide support (the equivalent of $50,000) to individuals to allow them to devote time to engage in leadership activities, building capacity in their home institution and across Ontario. “The Northern Ontario School of Medicine was founded on a strong social accountability mandate,” says Roger Strasser, NOSM Dean and CEO. “These fellowships, which advance compassionate care within the health-care community and sustain compassion in the environments on which health professionals learn and work, fit perfectly with the Schools’ distributed, community-engaged, learning-centred model of education and research.” Click here to access The Manitoulin Expositor article.

York Region article published October 18, 2017. Article in full pasted below. Heidi Riedner, Georgina Advocate Dressed appropriately in a liberal swath of red, Premier Kathleen Wynne paid a visit to Georgina’s nurse practitioner-led clinic to deliver a $1.63 million grant that will help meet the demand for local health care. “Everyone here supports and believes in the notion that we should be able to provide high-quality, patient-centred care for people as close to their homes as possible,” Wynne said during the announcement of the provincial funding at the Dalton Road clinic Oct. 11. “That’s what this clinic is about (and) our investment will help more people get the care they need faster and closer to home.” The long-awaited and much-anticipated funding is the result of a comprehensive application put together by the clinic’s director, Beth Cowper-Fung, finally making its way through the bureaucratic process. It will go toward the clinic’s new location on the vacant Lake Drive lot, just east of the town parkette, in Jackson’s Point. “Thanks to the generosity of the Georgina Community Health Care Council, we’ve been able to stay here while we’ve been waiting for this great news, however the current building no longer meets code for a medical facility,” Cowper-Fung said. More functional space to offer confidential programs to the clinic’s current 3,000 patients, as well as the opportunity to provide services to more people who do not have a primary health care provider are two key benefits of the new location, Cowper-Fung added. It is the next step not only in the evolution of the nurse-practitioner model of health care, but also what Wynne called a “transformation of health care in Ontario” built on an interdisciplinary approach “that we know works so well.” “To be fair, we’re just figuring that out again as a society,” Wynne said, adding offering an amalgam of services in one location is a “good idea” and counteracts the “silo” effect of care created during the past few decades. Wynne added Georgina’s clinic is “ahead of the curve” in that respect. Indeed, 15 applications were received from across the province this year, according to the executive director of the Nurse Practitioners’ Association of Ontario, Theresa Agnew. Nurse practitioners (NPs) started out as registered nurses (RNs) who went back to university to “learn how to do more for their patients”, Cowper-Fung said. Thanks to recent regulatory changes, the scope of nurse practitioners has expanded to include writing prescription medications and ordering diagnostic imaging. Georgina’s one and only NP-led clinic — one of 25 clinics serving 60,000 people in the province — has come a long way since NP Anne Hughes worked alongside Dr. Burrows almost a decade ago. Its current team offers primary care, as well as access to specialty services from social workers, a dietician, registered practical nurse, physiotherapist and lab technicians. Combined, they provide a gamut of services from mental health care, to service co-ordination and referral to community health care providers and agencies, chronic disease management programs, patient education, health promotion and disease prevention programs and palliative care. Services also include off-site house calls to the Chippewas of Georgina Island, local youth and women’s shelters and two area group homes. “We provide primary care and services to all ages at all stages,” Cowper-Fung said. “From the first prenatal visit when we get to hear that first heartbeat, which is so exciting, to the very last of palliative care when we hear the very last.” While the province is investing in family health teams and nurse practitioner-led clinics to advance the interdisciplinary care that people need, it also puts more money into hospitals, increasing funding for home care and mental health programs in schools, Wynne said. “We understand that we have to work on all fronts,” she said. Ontario’s health care budget for 2017-18 is $53.8 billion, which represents a 3.8 per cent increase from the previous year. The Central East LHIN’s annual budget, which includes York Region, is $2 billion. Breaking ground on the clinic’s new location is expected in 2018. Click here to access the York Region article.