Public clinic at UPEI's new medical school opening next week, says Health P.E.I. CEO
CBC
The patient medical home located at UPEI’s new medical school will open next week, Health P.E.I. CEO Melanie Fraser says.
“We’re starting small,” Fraser told a legislative standing committee on Friday, noting there will be about 12 people on the team to start but that number is expected to rise past 30 staff eventually.
She said the clinic will accept 100 patients to start.
“We’ll work through the kinks, make sure we have our care pathways sorted out, make sure the systems are functioning, and then we continue to build.”
Medical homes offer a wide range of services, with doctors collaborating with other health-care workers.
Fraser has previously said the UPEI medical home will take about 10,000 patients within two years.
Currently, there are more than 35,500 people on the provincial patient registry waiting to be assigned to a primary care provider.
Fraser told MLAs on Friday that one of the challenges in shrinking the registry is that when physicians retire, it can sometimes leave up to 3,000 patients without a doctor. She said it might take two to three new physicians to cover that workload.
But Fraser said Health P.E.I. is making strides in helping more Islanders access care.
She said the waitlist for cataract surgery has been effectively eliminated, and there has been an increase in virtual health-care visits over the last year. Fraser said MRIs, CT scans, and ultrasounds are increasing, and pointed to the open-access mental health counselling services that don’t require a referral.
Fraser also said that the investments into the UPEI medical school have “borne out.”
The P.E.I. campus of Memorial University's faculty of medicine welcomed its first students this fall. Fraser has said patient medical homes will be integrated into the school’s curriculum.
Friday, she said Health P.E.I. hopes it will be able to take advantage of the fact that the new clinic is in a learning environment.
“We’ve got the support from all of the faculties there [and] we’ll have many learners, whether they’re nurses or kinesiologists or physicians coming into the home.”
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