The timing of a $1.7 million project aimed at developing a province-wide network of expertise in geriatric care couldn’t have come at a better time for Northern Ontario. Conceived by Dr. David Ryan, director of education with the Regional Geriatric Program (RGP) of Toronto, the Network of Centres of Excellence in Practice Based Inter-professional Education and Inter-organizational Collaboration in Geriatric Care will bring together representatives from family health teams, community health centres and other health-care organizations across Ontario to improve the quality of care for frail seniors.
The initiative took shape just as efforts to establish one or more regional geriatric programs in Northern Ontario were getting off the ground.
In the absence of an RGP in the North, Dr. Ryan contacted Thunder Bay geriatrician, Dr. Trevor Bon, and Mary Lou Kelley, director of Lakehead University’s Centre for Education & Research on Aging and Health (CERAH) to administer the project in the northwest.
Five existing RGPs in Ottawa, Kingston, Toronto, Hamilton and London were in place to deliver the initiative in southern Ontario. CERAH, in partnership with St. Joseph’s Care Group in Thunder Bay, agreed to serve as the administering agency for the northwest, but that still left the northeast out in the cold.
“Initially, they tried to make me promise to do it, but I said it would be very challenging for us to do the northeast,” recalled Kelly. “That’s the problem when you don’t have an RGP. Who’s going to take the lead?”
Eventually, Kim Rossi, the City of Sudbury’s co-ordinator of community, seniors and health development took on the assignment under the umbrella of the fledgling Northeastern Ontario Specialized Geriatric Services team.
The objective of the 15-month project is to improve the diagnosis and management of frail seniors, 43 per cent of whom have three or more chronic health conditions.
The curriculum will include topics such as distinguishing between delirium, depression and dementia, said Kelley.
“Older people often present with symptoms of confusion
or cognitive impairment, and how you go about treating the problem is different depending on what it is. Some of the symptoms can be seen as the same if people don’t have the skill to distinguish between them.”
Health-care providers nominated to represent their family health team or other organization will be expected to share their knowledge with their colleagues when they return home.
“It will be up to them to decide the most effective way to share the information,” said Kelley. “It might be through formalized workshops or they may choose to incorporate it into something they’re already doing.
“One of the things we’ve learned is that rural health-care providers are extremely busy and, for the most part, they’re overextended, so in order to make the education as user-friendly as possible, we have to be flexible about how to approach it.
“Each community does palliative care, chronic disease management, geriatric care and diabetes management, but you know what? They’re all the same people. There are no more people, so you can’t start running around creating all these teams. You can’t have a palliative care team, a diabetes team and a stroke rehabilitation team. It gets to be just a joke and the people just get mad because they change their name and walk into the next room.”
Regional consultants hired in each of the seven centres will begin delivering curriculum to front-line health-care professionals as soon as next month. The northwest is planning a two-day workshop in Dryden in mid-October and a second workshop in Thunder Bay in February.
All of the other centres are limiting participation to family health teams and community health centres, but the northwest has chosen to also extend invitations to rural hospitals, long-term care homes, community mental health programs and other health-care organizations caring for seniors.
Having come on board a little later than all of the other centres, the northeast was still recruiting staff and developing plans at press time.
cerah.lakeheadu.ca
rgps.on.ca |
