The Frontenac, Lennox and Addington Ontario Health Team (FLA-OHT) and Kingston Community Health Centres (KCHC) announced that a third family doctor has joined the Greater Napanee Health Home (GNHH), with Dr. Max Pang joining the health team.
Dr. Pang is a graduate of the University of British Columbia with degrees in medicine and pharmacology and recently finished his residency in Prince George, previous completing some rotations of his residency at Lennox and Addington County Hospital.
In a release, Dr. Pang said he was sold on the area during his rotations there and is excited to return.
“My positive interactions with patients and the health care team in Napanee convinced me to return,” says Dr. Pang.
“I’m super excited to work in the new Greater Napanee Health Home, where everyone will have access to a family doctor and health-care providers are supported in a team environment.”
The clinic first recruited Dr. Candy in February – ahead of the official opening in April – followed by Dr. Pukas in July, and in a news release announcing Dr. Pang’s recruitment shared that they have so far been able to attach 500 people in Napanee to a new primary care provider.
Dr. Kim Morrison, FLA OHT Executive Lead, says Dr. Pang’s addition should eventually be able to help address nearly a thousand more unrostered community members, working towards the estimated 5,000 residents without a family physician – an issue common throughout the province.
She says the clinic’s model of surrounding family physicians and nurse practitioners with other health professionals under one roof – like physiotherapists, dieticians, and mental health workers – is a way to simplify the job of family physicians, thereby making the field more attractive to aspiring doctors and allowing those in the field to connect with more patients.
“What this model addresses is that today’s family physicians do not really want to run, for the most part, their own businesses,” Dr. Morrison said.
“So a model where they don’t have to I truly believe will help recruitment to that field… I’m hopeful that we’re swinging the curve, certainly the curve leading up to here was straight down.”
Dr. Morrison said interest in family medicine from medical students has been dwindling, and even many who have trained to be family physicians look to other jobs than primary care upon entering the workforce.
She says this new model exhibited by both GNHH and the Midtown Kingston Health Home, which opened this week at 791 Princess Street in Kingston, will be an innovative way to attack the shortage of family doctors.
The partnership between FLA-OHT and KCHC takes the administrative load out of the hands of doctors and it is handled by KCHC, while having a wide array of health professionals under one roof allows for more efficient referral process and collaboration.
“In this model with Kingston Community Health Centers providing the backbone of administration… and it’s no longer required for the individual physicians to be doing that work,” Dr. Morrison said.
“The people who are most trained to provide that type of information or care can do that leaving the family physician to do other things that should be done by the family physician and are probably better by other people of the team.”
Both sites aim to take much of the administrative load away from primary care providers, while also bringing a number of different specialists under one roof.
The Midtown Kingston Health Home opened on Tuesday, after KCHC received $4.1 million in funding from the provincial government, and the lease at the current location is only for one year as already plans to move to a bigger building – expected to be the old site of Extendicare following a finalized lease agreement – to expand offered services within a team of 30 health professionals.
To start with, the Kingston clinic will have five physicians, three nurse practitioners and a multidisciplinary team of supporting health-care practitioners in house, and expectations are that it will eventually be able to roster 8000 patients – fielding them from those registered on Health Care Connect, starting with those in the surrounding area.
