BY NORM TOLLINSKY

The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care has announced plans to help orphan patients find a primary care provider. The new Health Care Connect service will take calls from orphan patients looking for a family physician or other primary care provider, register them in a database and arrange for care connectors in Community Care Access Centres (CCAC) to follow-up.

CCAC care connectors will contact the orphan patients, administer a questionnaire to determine their health status and try to link them up with primary care providers.
“It’s not going to be first come, first served,” said Rémy Beaudoin, CEO of the Northeast LHIN. “It will be based on need.”

Family doctors will receive additional fees for agreeing to take on a patient from the Care Connect list “to make it interesting for them,” said Beaudoin. “A lot of physicians already have a full complement of patients. However, we think that because of the incentive, they will take on additional patients.”

The North East and North West LHINs are two of the three LHINs in the province with the highest number of unattached patients.

The registry will also provide standardized, province-wide data that can be used for planning purposes.

“It will help us make decisions on the allocation of family health teams and nurse clinics,” said Beaudoin. “It may even lead to opening more seats at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine.”

The Care Connect service is one of several initiatives the province is implementing to ease congestion in emergency rooms and reduce the number of alternate level of care patients taking up acute care beds in hospitals.

The Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care will also fund nurse outreach teams to supplement nursing care in long-term care homes.

The additional nursing resources will be deployed to help reduce emergency room visits and provide the care required to return patients to long-term care homes following a hospital stay.

A new pay for performance scheme is also being introduced to reward hospitals for meeting wait time goals.

Last year, pay for performance was based on the length of stay from the time people entered the ER to the time they received a bed, but Northern hospitals weren’t able to qualify because of the ALC challenges they faced. This year, pay for performance will just be based on the length of stay in emergency departments.