Patients' Medical Home for our Community!
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The story so far … (2014)
Later this year the Care in the Creek Medical Centre in Bragg Creek will enjoy it’s second anniversary. How time has flown by! Thanks to the generous donations from the people of the Greater Bragg Creek area, and the hard work of the staff at the centre, we now have a busy and thriving facility to serve the primary health care needs of our community. For this initial period, the focus of the Care in the Creek medical and support staff has been to build the patient panel and establish the operational processes and procedures that enables them to serve you and I - the patients in the community. This has been achieved and many of us have benefited as a result.
Later this year the Care in the Creek Medical Centre in Bragg Creek will enjoy it’s second anniversary. How time has flown by! Thanks to the generous donations from the people of the Greater Bragg Creek area, and the hard work of the staff at the centre, we now have a busy and thriving facility to serve the primary health care needs of our community. For this initial period, the focus of the Care in the Creek medical and support staff has been to build the patient panel and establish the operational processes and procedures that enables them to serve you and I - the patients in the community. This has been achieved and many of us have benefited as a result.
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What is meant by the term
Patients’ Medical Home? Firstly, it is intended to capture a made-in-Canada vision of family practice and primary care. For us in Alberta, it builds on the Primary Care Networks initiative which embraces the concept of a patient-centred medical home as a strong starting point. The Patients’ Medical Home is the patient-centred family practice identified by its patients as the place that serves as the home base or central hub for the timely provision and coordination of all their health and medical care needs. It is the place where community members feel most comfortable to present and discuss their personal and family health and medical concerns. The concept recognizes that different communities have different needs, and so we can expect Care in the Creek to evolve, in order to better meet the growing and changing needs of our community and its population. The inter-professional teams and networks that the Care in the Creek team have begun to build, will therefore develop in support of the specific needs of the patients in our community. Care in the Creek will continue to embrace collaborative and complementary roles for other health professionals who will work with our family physicians at the medical centre in Bragg Creek. The vision for Care in the Creek Medical Centre therefore is to be the home base for the continuous interaction between us, the patients, and our personal family physicians. It is where a team or network of caregivers, including nurses, physician assistants and other health professionals – located in the physical site or linked virtually from different practice sites throughout the local or extended community – work together with our personal family physician to provide and coordinate a comprehensive range of medical and health care services required by each of us. |
Where do we go from here …
Looking forward, the focus now shifts to a longer-term vision, which will help to ensure the sustainability and consistency of the service offered to the community. The basis of the vision for Care in the Creek comes from work performed by the College of Family Physicians of Canada, summarized in their discussion paper published in October 2009. This paper described the pillars of a model of family practice focused on meeting patient needs. The pillars are:
This vision has been captured in the notion that family practices such as Care in the Creek will serve as the Patients’ Medical Home, and so this is the vision that Care in the Creek Medical Centre will use as it defines its future. |
Your role in achieving the vision …
If the Care in the Creek team is to provide the best primary health care service, then we also have a responsibility as community members to support the vision. How do we do that? Firstly we each need to choose to make Care in the Creek our "Medical Home". That means having a regular physical exam and discussing all our needs with the physician at the clinic. Then, when we have a more urgent need, it can be attended to efficiently and competently because both parties have a trust in each other. Further we need to encourage use of the clinic by our neighbours and community. That way we will be able to expand our services (i.e. hours, programs, etc.) that we, the medical clinic family, have identified as important. Lastly this clinic has now been here for nearly two years. It has proven itself! It is time for each of us to commit to making this our Medical Home and giving us the satisfaction of knowing we are receiving the best in personalized, coordinated medical care from knowledgeable, caring physicians. |