Michener Institute advocates team approach to health care
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Posted By VALERIE MACDONALD NORTHUMBERLAND TODAY
Posted 2 months ago
PORT HOPE -- Health care delivery is changing slowly with the development of, and provincial funding for , community health centres, nurse practitioners and health care teams in addition to funding hospitals and doctors, says the head of The Michener Institute. But "we still haven't really put the consumer in the equation," says Dr. Paul Gamble.
His Toronto-based institution has been educating people in applied health care sciences since 1958. Today that includes every professional from chiropodists to those in nuclear medicine.
In the past few years it has injected the Inter Professional Collaboration objective into courses in each year of instruction as a way to establish professional collaboration as an integrate part of the process. Professionals caring for patients must recognize that each can't meet all of their needs but working together can accomplish much more, he said.
His institution provides simulation situations and clinical opportunities so that working collaboratively is central and not an "add on," Gamble said. At this time in other institutions, and previously at The Michener Institute, education was in "silos". That has been changed at his institution over the past five years but there was resistance initially, he said.
The next step, however, is that the team must not just include collaboration by professional health care workers but to include the patient or client. At this time, to the best of his knowledge there isn't any health education facility taking this approach, he said.
Given the change in philosophy from wellness being defined as the absence of disease in the 1940s to well being in a patient's social, physical, spiritual and emotional status, about 30 years later, the patient's participation in the health care process is still not a given.
This is something that much change, the audience at the Port Hope Community Health Centre's annual general meeting was told.
vmacdonald@northumberland today.com
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