|  | Weekly Newsletter: February 6, 2023 |  | Dear HFAM Colleagues, Last Thursday morning the Ontario government released Your Health: A Plan for Connected and Convenient Care. Per their announcement, “the plan focuses on providing people with a better health care experience by connecting them to more convenient options closer to home while shortening wait times for key services across the province and growing the health care workforce for years to come.” So what does this mean for primary care? The big take aways are: OHTs will be tasked with expanding team-based primary care. An investment of $30 million will be used to create interprofessional primary care teams and to help bridge the gap in accessing team-based care for vulnerable, marginalized and unattached patients. OHTs will be tasked with creating a primary care network to be part of decision-making and to improve access to care for patients. 1,200 physicians will be added to family health organizations (FHOs) over the next 2 years. Over the next 2 years, access to training will be expanded for nurses by adding up to 500 registered practical nurses, 1,000 registered nurse training spots, and adding 150 education seats for nurse practitioners to help create faster access to primary care.
We will be delving more into the impacts of this plan on primary care at our March Town Hall, but in the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to reach out (HFAM@GHHN.ca). With deep appreciation for all that you do, Brian, Cathy, Dee, Kati, Scott, Tammy, Your GHHN Primary Care Executive | | Newsletter Highlights: | Black History Month Educational Update A Fond and Grateful Farewell to Dr. Dee Mangin Primary Care Nursing and PA Environmental Community of Practice Health811 (Formerly ‘Telehealth’) Gastroenterology Centralized Referral Service
| | Black History Month | In our commitment to celebrating Black Excellence, addressing the injustices faced and amplifying the voices and narratives across the Black community, each February HFAM newsletter will include learning opportunities and materials with which we invite you to engage. We hope you can find space in your busy schedule to attend a virtual event, watch a video, listen to a podcast, and/or reflect. This is a time that calls for learning and unlearning as individuals, practitioners, and a primary care community. If you have resources or events you would like shared, please email us at HFAM@GHHN.ca. | | The Immortal Life of Henrietta LacksThere can be no reconciliation without first, and foremost, truth. The truth is that medicine holds a long and dark history of exploitation of Black peoples, and the impact continues. While Black History month is a time to celebrate the amazing contributions of Black peoples to medicine, it is also a time to acknowledge the oppression experienced, then and now. No story encompasses both of these more than the immortalization of Henrietta Lacks. In 1951, Ms. Lacks, a mother of five, presented with vaginal bleeding to Johns Hopkins Hospital, the only hospital in her area that treated Black patients. During her treatment, and after her death, cells from her cervical cancer were harvested without her or her family’s consent or knowledge. Her cells hold the unique ability to rapidly reproduce in a laboratory setting. Known as HeLa cells, Ms. Lacks lives on through an immortal cell line that forms the basis of nearly 60,000 research publications and 20,000 scientific patents. HeLa cells were used to develop the polio vaccine, in HIV/AIDS research, cancer treatment protocols, and more recently, the COVID-19 vaccine. Her family was not made aware of HeLa cell use until the 1970s. In 2013, the DNA sequence of HeLa cells was published, again without the family’s consent. The generation and dissemination of Ms. Lack’s cells is a multi-billion dollar industry, with no proceeds received by, and only recent acknowledgement to, the Lacks family. |
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| Author Rebecca Skloot publicized Ms. Lacks’ story in her book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2010, and her story was turned into a film of the same title in 2017, starring Oprah Winfrey. In 2021, the World Health Organization posthumously awarded Henrietta Lacks the WHO Director General’s award, recognizing her world-changing legacy. As the WHO stated: “In honoring Henrietta Lacks, WHO acknowledges the importance of reckoning with past scientific injustices, and advancing racial equity in health and science. It’s also an opportunity to recognize women - particularly women of colour - who made incredible but often unseen contributions to medical science.” If you would like to learn more about Henrietta Lacks, you can: Written by Anjali Menezes EVENTS: Black History Month Storytellers’ Symposium Diversity Through the Eyes of Stories Date: Monday, February 27, 4-5PM Additional details can be found here. Register here.
Reverend John C Holland Awards Date: Saturday, February 18, 5:30PM Additional details, including how to register, can be found here.
A Black History of Hamilton and Ancaster - Hamilton Speaker Series Date: Tuesday, February 21, 7-8PM Additional details can be found here. Register here.
Celebrating Black Resistance - Black History Date: Wednesday, February 22, 5:30-7:30PM Additional details can be found here. Register here.
| | Educational Update: | HFAM Rounds Schedule - February 2023 Wednesday, February 8: Wednesday, February 15: Wednesday, February 22:
Click here to view/download the February schedule with Zoom Link information. Past HFAM Round Presentations: | | A Fond and Grateful Farewell to Dr. Dee Mangin | | Dr. Dee Mangin moved to Hamilton from Christchurch, NZ in the summer of 2013. She brought with her an intense passion for and belief in the importance of primary care and family medicine to patients and communities – and the transformative of power of family medicine to anchor a high functioning health care system. As a community of family physicians in Hamilton – and across Ontario – we saw Dee transform her passion and expertise into the COVID@Home project – a practical, evidence informed, family medicine led virtual program for the community based care of COVID-19 patients. These primary care pathways were used by 1000s of physicians (in all corners of the globe), anchored in the |
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| HFAM.ca website which she was also instrumental in creating and maintaining. Patients cared for by their family doctors in this way had better outcomes – and fewer deaths – than those without this kind of access. What a powerful demonstration of the power of the continuity based relationship between a patient and their family doctor and/or primary care team! Dee’s contribution to the academic Department of Family Medicine in her role as Professor, Associate Chair, Research and David Braley and Nancy Gordon Chair in Family Medicine are too numerous to outline here. She will be dearly missed by her colleagues, students and the deep friendships she has formed during her time here. Dee has been called back to New Zealand to be a loving daughter and carer for her mother. Hamilton will always be her second “home” – and we look forward to maintaining virtual connections and ongoing friendships with Dee for years to come. Ten years isn’t a long time to leave a lasting legacy – but Dee’s impact will continue to reverberate in many corners. | | Primary Care Nursing and PA Environmental Community of Practice | | The Hamilton Family Health Team’s Green Initiative is supporting the formation of an environmental sustainability community of practice composed of RNs, NPs, PAs, and RPNs working in primary care in the Greater Hamilton Health Network region (including Hamilton, Haldimand, and Niagara Northwest). We are so excited to see what the passion in this group contributes to high-quality, low-carbon patient care. If you have ideas to share with this community, or just want to come check it out, join us by registering for the inaugural meeting on Tuesday February 28th, 2023, 12-1pm via Zoom. Meetings will be virtual and the team will decide how many per year. Please share this invitation with your team members. |
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| | | Health811 (Formerly ‘Telehealth’) | On January 30th, Dr. Sacha Bhatia, Senior Vice President, Population Health and Value Based Health Systems, Ontario Health, released a memo regarding Health811. You can view the full memo, which outlines its services here. If you are having issues with the service or getting feedback from your patients, please let us know by emailing us at HFAM@GHHN.ca. | | Gastroenterology Centralized Referral Service | The Gastroenterology Service at HHS recently reached out to remind us that there is a centralized referral service for family physicians. Using the centralized referral service ensures that patients receive the most appropriate care for their condition in the most efficient manner possible. Currently wait times for diagnostics are quite short with capacity to see urgent patients in 1-2 weeks. By referring your patients for diagnostics via this centralized referral service you can be assured that results will be followed up by specialists in the 2F Digestive Diseases Clinic. To refer to the Gastroenterology Centralized Service you can use the HHS referral form found at: https://www.hamiltonhealthsciences.ca/areas-of-care/surgical-care/endoscopy-gi/ Or you can fax a generic referral to 905 526 0594. The target for triaging urgent referrals is within 24 hours. You can select a specific GI provider to send the referral to, or if you indicate “any GI,” the referral will be triaged to the first available appointment. Please ensure that the referral is complete. If a patient needs to be seen in the Urgent GI Clinic within 1 week, referring providers can call or email our Nurse Navigator (Phone: 905 521 2100 Ext. 76933 or Email: GInursetriage@HHSC.ca) to facilitate the booking. Important Contact Details: | | Missed a Past Newsletter? | We know our inboxes are all bursting at the seams and it can be easy to miss a newsletter. In an effort to make HFAM communications easier for you to find, we’ve added a Newsletter Archives section on our website here. | | | |
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