OHT Funding Opportunity
Hi Everyone,
Thank you all for your hard work during this difficult third wave. It’s heartwarming to see and hear many of you helping out in vaccination clinics and the ICU, in addition to all the other settings we work! It’s important we maintain the message that Primary Care is open and continues to provide preventative health and chronic disease management. If you are looking to ask patients to defer non-essential insurance forms and medical notes, Dr. Jeff Weissberger has written a great letter to his patients and has kindly shared it if you wish to adapt, see attached.
A few other updates for you:
1. Supporting physicians without primary care providers
The Department of Family and Community Medicine has aDocs4Docs program to support physicians who do not currently have a family doctor. If you have the capacity to accept a physician into your practice as a patient, please email Dr. John Maxted at jmaxted@istar.ca by Friday April 30th.
2. Opportunity for Funding Primary Care Initiatives in our OHT
Our OHT has funds for the 2021/22 fiscal year to support projects that further our mission of improving coordinated care. Projects can focus on our current priority populations of Dementia or Mental Health & Addictions, or identify new priority populations for our OHT. I’ve attached our OHT’s Strategic Plan and Project Proposal Template. If you have any ideas, please email me at emilielam@gmail.com. The OHT can provide administrative and project management support including help with drafting the project proposal. This is a great opportunity for Primary Care to bring forward initiatives that help support the care we provide our patients.
3. COVID Vaccination in Primary Care
Attached is an OMA tool to help you decide if providing COVID vaccine is right for your practice. If you are interested in administering COVID vaccine in your practice, complete the York Region Primary Care Readiness Survey. There are numerous resources available, and I’ve organized in an online folder you can access here, including York Region onboarding documents and flyer for the Community of Practice. Andrea Groff, Executive Director at Health for All has kindly offered to be our local “peer-support”, so if you have questions about on-boarding your practice, you can email her at agroff@healthforallfht.ca.
Across the province 5 million COVID vaccines have been administered to date. 91% of those age 80+ and 38.5% of the adult population in Ontario have at least one dose. We are expecting another 4 million doses of Pfizer in May, 388,100 doses of Moderna the week of May 10th and waiting confirmation of shipments from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. Locally this means Cornell Vaccination Clinic will be ramping up volumes over the next two weeks and our OHT is working with York Region Public Health to organize pop-up vaccination in select workplaces in L3R. So I'm optimistic that things will be getting better soon!
Stay safe!
Em
