With the help of new provincial funding, three primary care clinics forced to close last year due to a financial shortfall – including two student-assisted clinics – will re-open to support thousands of local residents.
The medical clinics, led by nurse practitioners, provide health care services for many London families who face a variety of barriers, such as poverty and lack of transportation, and focus on primary care services including managing chronic conditions, preventing disease and health promotion.
Created through the Office of Interprofessional Health Education and Research at Western, the housing unit clinics – Southdale and Allan Rush Gardens – are modeled after the initial Merrymount Children’s Centre program and engage community members, health care students and practitioners in working towards a common goal.
“It allowed us to take interprofessional groups of students not just from Western, but from Fanshawe as well, to go and learn about delivering care and health promotion programs into these communities, based on the service learning model, where residents told us what their needs were,” says Carole Orchard, Western associate professor and Interprofessional Education Initiatives coordinator.
“I remember when we first opened the clinics the kinds of programs I would have thought of delivering were not what we delivered. It’s given us this wonderful opportunity to actually take our interprofessional concept around collaborative practice, which is very client centred, and demonstrate how you do it.”
As a clinical practice component of health programs, the students provide nursing, social work, speech-language pathology, medicine, physical therapy, occupational therapy and nutrition services. During the initial 10-month run of the clinics, more than 1,400 patients were treated, reducing residents’ trips to London emergency rooms by 50 per cent.
They will reopen thanks to funding provided through the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.
The clinics also allowed for research opportunities, where Orchard studied the role patients wanted to play in the partnership. And what she learned was a little shocking to her.
“We don’t listen to them very well,” she says. “As a result of those early findings, the way we’ve implemented the patient-centred collaborative model is really waiting to hear from the patient what they want help with, which is a different model from what we teach in health programs. So we’re trying to influence within the university setting – with all our students – a different way of approaching care. When we actually have the placement sites, we will be able to implement those things and track the outcome.”
Expected to reopen later this month, Orchard says the clinics will “provide health services while educating future health practitioners and conducting research to enhance better practices and care delivery.”
She adds the team-based approach to frontline health care will see nurse practitioners working with doctors, nurses, dieticians, social workers and other health care providers.
The community/university partnership will allow Orchard to continue her research, which she says the housing units’ residents have been eager to assist with. She adds residents have often told her the clinics create a community within a community.
“They allow us to ask them questions to learn, because they know we are all learning together,” she says. “It’s really the epitome of what collaboration is all about and when we talk about an interprofessional, client-centred collaborative practice, that’s what we want to emulate.”