A new style of clinic is going to be established in Yorkton, with a satellite office in Foam Lake. The new concept, dubbed a Primary Health Care Innovation Site, will take a team-based approach to healthcare in the Sunrise Health Region.
Dr. Philip Fourie says the new project is very different from the traditional clinic, as a group focus will allow for different approaches in health care. The approach will take advantage of different skill sets offered by people with different specialities, with family physicians, pharmacists, dieticians, nurses and others working together. He says this team-based approach will ensure that the desired outcomes can be achieved, as everyone's strengths will be used to give the best treatment.
He also says the clinic will have space for individual visits, group appointments with the entire health care team, and an opportunity for shared visits, where patients with the same condition meet with doctors at the same time.
"They will ask a question that applies to them, and often the others in the group will find that they had that same question. The advantage to that is the team doesn't have to explain everything eight times, they explain it once. It's a way of learning from each other," Fourie says.
The initial stage of the project will focus on patients with chronic conditions, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
"Because we don't have a physical location yet, we don't want to wait until that building is up and running. We've decided to start as a chronic disease team because we can start that work before the building is there, so that approach is also an innovation," Fourie says.
The design for the clinic itself is going to be modular in order to make it easy to adapt to other communities and their needs, which might need a different amount of space and offer different services. Fourie says this step makes it easier for other places who want to implement similar clinics down the line.
"If you're in Yorkton, you're going to need more components than in Preeceville, but you won't have as many as in Saskatoon. Design it in such a way that depending on the community where you are, you can add components, take away components, and then use the same design so you don't have to pay architects to come up with it."
The plan will also see residents coming to the city, with four to eight students current planned to become part of the clinic after it opens.
"What we know from experience is when students have their training in a regional or rural community, they tend to stay there. I've always said that the way to bring physicians to our health region is to have a place where they want to work, and this is going to be part of that... I see this as a huge opportunity for recruitment in our region," Fourie says.
Consultations for the building will be coming in the next month, and it is hoped that construction will begin in the summer.
