Running Down the Path Forward for Ontario Health Teams
Message from Executive Lead, Dr. Kim Morrison
As short a month as February may be, the FLA OHT has many projects and initiatives moving full steam ahead. February celebrates many things including Black History Month, Valentine’s Day, Family Day, and Canadian Heart Month where attention is brought to the importance of cardiovascular health and steps that can be taken to reduce risk of cardiovascular disease.
The FLA OHT focus on the People Centered Health Home incorporates education and support strategies for people to influence their own health, preventative care strategies for primary care teams to help identify and intervene early in disease processes and seamless connections to specialized care for people when it is needed to try to influence the course of chronic disease progression. In this way, the aim is to integrate wellness and health across the spectrum of both people’s lives and the providers who support them – truly a TEAM event.
Over the past month the FLA OHT’s Specialist Network, under the leadership of Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, Chief of Staff at Kingston Health Sciences Centre (KHSC), has been mobilized to begin the work of implementing the four Clinical Pathways identified in the Minister of Health’s Ontario Health Teams “The Path Forward” document. Building on the collaborative Innovation Portfolio Pathways work done by Dr. Elizabeth Eisenhauer, Dr. Melissa Kelly, Madelaine Meehan and primary care leaders Drs. Justyna Nowak, Kevin Laughlin and Matt Dumas, care pathways for congestive heart failure, (CHF) chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), stroke and diabetes will be developed across sectors from community to primary care to specialist and in hospital care, keeping people, not just their condition or diagnosis as the centre of this work.
In this month’s newsletter we showcase the collaborative work of our partners and illustrate what can be done better when we work together. We highlight the Palliative Care Partnership and the incredible achievements they are pushing forward, we take a look inside a Health Home at Kingston’s Health Hub where innovating partnership is bettering lives, we hear about the construction of a hospice which will be another Health Home in action, and learn how the Stroke Network of Southeastern Ontario is finding success through collaboration to improve access to evidence-based prevention and treatment across the care continuum.
I hope you enjoy learning about the work of the FLA OHT and its partners in this newsletter and the information shared online and across social media platforms. These are challenging times, and in health care in particular, however with shared vision and a commitment to working together I am confident that as an Ontario Health Team we can be the difference that we all need to achieve our best health.