I have been avoiding doing this.
I’m not exactly sure why. But I haven’t wanted to write this post. I’ve been avoiding it for months.
It’s occurring to me that that’s kind of what we’ve all been doing. We’re avoiding dealing with this really huge issue because, well, it’s just so big and it feels beyond us to do. But reading the articles over the last few days from the nurses and the paramedics, well, I can’t wait any longer to address this with all of you.
We need to talk about healthcare.
We need to talk about what we CAN do to help out here. Because this is an issue that affects all of us. It’s not just on doctors or the healthcare system to figure out and solve for us. It’s on us too. And much like choosing not to use bottled water, or not using single-use plastic bags at the grocery store, there ARE things that each and every one of us CAN do to help out. There are things that we can do to try to alleviate some of the burden on the system. And that’s not to say that we stop putting pressure where it needs to be to create long lasting changes within the system. But it’s much like taking ibuprofen for a sprained wrist while also doing the physical therapy that ensures it heals properly, there are things that we can do short-term to help with non-emergency patient care to give a little pain-relief for the hospitals while we also work towards making the changes required to heal the system long-term.
There are a lot of people who have non-urgent or even non-medical issues who have no other option but to use emergency services because there just isn’t access to services elsewhere. Not only that, but most people don’t know what is or isn’t a medical issue. They aren’t supposed to. There are professionals with this training who are supposed to tell them. But when those professionals are required elsewhere to deal with the actual medical or emergency cases, it leaves a lot of people unattended to. It’s tricky because those people need to be seen. But someone who has chronic low back pain that just flared up again, who has no family doctor, all of the walk-ins are already full because it’s past 9am, and they are in agony, they take the spot of someone who fell and broke their ankle, delaying that person from receiving the care they require.
If we can take the patients out of emergency departments who don’t need to be there – and most of them don’t want to have to be there, there just really aren’t any other options – then it frees up a number of spots for people with actual emergency and medical conditions. It doesn’t fix the system. But it provides some temporary relief. And for that patient with the broken ankle, it makes a really crappy day a little bit better because they get seen a little sooner.
That was the idea behind the Unified Health Triage Centres.
So here’s where people start shouting at me again about privatized healthcare – we’re not trying to be ‘private healthcare’. We’re trying to use resources that people already have to pay for and just use them in a way that helps alleviate some strain on the overburdened healthcare system. Yes, yes, I know, in the short-term you may have to pay for an appointment with the nurse practitioner – we tried to get her salary covered while we got up and running but were consistently denied everywhere. It’s a problem with the provincial system. But the beauty of the model that we came up with is that if the other services we provide are utilized to a certain amount they can pay for her. That was the idea. The same way that the front desk staff’s salaries are covered by a certain percentage of profits from the massage therapists and osteopathic appointments, if we had enough practitioners seeing enough patients, we could provide the services of the nurse practitioner for free to the public and pay her like we would the front desk staff.
None of this, however, made its way in to any of the media articles written about us. Nor did they highlight the work we were doing to try to change the legislation that means that appointments with a nurse practitioner can’t be covered by MSI unless a doctor interacts with the patient first, meaning that, in a doctor shortage, nurse practitioner run clinics can only happen as long as the NSHA pays for them. Nurse practitioners cannot operate as independent practitioners the way family doctors can. And there is a waitlist a mile long to get funding for nurse practitioners through the NSHA.
Given this, yes, you have to pay for an appointment with a nurse practitioner with us. But the idea was that people only had to until we reached a critical mass of appointments with the other practitioners and then we could self-fund our nurse practitioner, returning to being able to provide free healthcare. We told everyone to keep their receipts because as soon as we could we would reimburse them. It was supposed to be a short-term necessary evil. But then we circumvent the backlogs with the NSHA and suddenly there’s a way to free nurse practitioners to be able to practice to their full extent without being handcuffed by ridiculous and out-dated policy while we wait the years it will take for those policies to be changed. We can provide free healthcare services without requiring funding from government to do so.
I can understand how this was disconcerting to the public system.
It means that ‘Wellness’ could suddenly become a new system. If there was the possibility to remove the control of healthcare services from ‘healthcare’… well… sh*t. That’s a revolution apparently no one was ready for…
Imagine, the healthcare monopoly taken away from doctors and shared with nurse practitioners… Well, that just couldn’t happen.
And, oh, the backlash…
But we’re still here.
And we’re still on target for being able to make this revolution possible.
All we need is you.
So all of you now have a choice. Do you use the services of a wellness clinic whose profits go into the pockets of the owners, or do you use the services of a wellness clinic who uses the profits to pay for nurse practitioners to provide free healthcare services outside of the broken government system while it takes the time required to fix itself?
That’s a choice we all can make. Like choosing reuseable bags instead of single-use plastic. Consumers have a power that has been demonstrated over and over. So the next time you need a massage, or don’t know where to go to talk about making some healthy changes in your life with a naturopath, or want to talk about the grief you’re feeling over the loss of a loved one, your choice to use a Unified Health clinic means providing free healthcare to someone who doesn’t have a family doctor, can’t wait all day at a walk-in because they desperately need to work, and frees up a spot at an emergency department until the policies get changed that allow nurse practitioners to bill MSI and operate independently.
The choice is, always, yours.
Till next time, Folks…