The Sunshine Coast’s A GP for Me proposal, meant to connect locals who want doctors with general practitioners accepting patients, was recently approved and has resulted in two new services designed to help.
“We’ve got some really fairly simple mechanisms in place to help make sure people who want a doctor have one,” said Jane Bishop, lead doctor and steering committee member with the Sunshine Coast A GP for Me initiative.
The committee has set up a new attachment assessment clinic and hired a patient navigator.
“The attachment assessment clinic will be held geographically in two different places in Gibsons and in Sechelt. It is time limited. We have funding until just before Christmas at this point in time,” Bishop said. “The office space is provided by Vancouver Coastal Health and we have a number that people can start phoning in order to make appointments if they want a doctor.”
The number to reach the attachment assessment clinic is 604-885-8644.
“We really want people to uptake on that because part of what we’re doing with this of course is gathering data,” Bishop said. “Unfortunately we don’t know the exact number of unattached patients in our little ribbon community because they’re unable to separate our data from the North Shore’s.”
In addition to information gathering and trying to match patients with doctors through the attachment assessment clinic, Bishop said a new patient navigator has been hired to help “move patients through the system in a way that works for them better.”
She said the kind of person who would need a patient navigator “varies quite a lot.”
“If I were, for example, to suddenly get sick with a complicated illness, even though I may have more knowledge about the system I might not know how to access services at say the cancer agency or the services for complicated surgeries after I’m getting better, where the patient navigator knows those things,” Bishop said.
“Sometimes it’s a person who if they had care in their home they might be better at home, or it might be a person who doesn’t have a home at all. It might be a person who is unable to understand, for a variety of reasons of language or mental health, how to access things, but lots of times it’s simply complicated medical issues.”
Coasters can access the patient navigator via email at [email protected] or by calling 604-741-3180.
The two new initiatives are just part of the overall A GP for Me plan to be implemented between now and March of next year.
Other aims of the plan are to improve physician recruitment and retention on the Coast, to better streamline the way services are delivered by doctors locally and to better support vulnerable patients.
The local A GP for Me proposal was approved by the General Practices Services Committee (GPSC) in March and was funded to the tune of $400,000 for one year.
The GPSC is a joint committee of the Ministry of Health and the Doctors of B.C.
The committee was tasked with selecting A GP for Me proposals from across the province to be funded.
The Sunshine Coast A GP for Me plan will be officially launched at an event on April 23 at 4:30 p.m. at the Sechelt (shíshálh) Hospital where a new website dubbed FETCH (For Everything That is Community Health) will also be unveiled.
