• Erk@cdda.social
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      1 year ago

      Well, a huge one is finding ways to make them easily accessible to doctors without uprooting the entire current infrastructure. The average doc can’t just host a physiotherapist, dietician, and social worker in their clinic, and to work best there needs to be open communication between the different branches.

      That’s a fixable problem, probably starting by opening clinics where all the professionals work under one roof and the doctors are subcontractors to the clinic rather than owners and managers. That’s a structure that wouldn’t appeal to everyone but it would appeal to many. Then those clinics could take specific patient populations preferentially to do their primary care, eg. elderly people, people with multiple chronic illnesses, etc - helping to take the load from docs in independent practice who would rather not be part of a larger team. There are already clinics like that out there, and they’ve been pretty successful.

      Ultimately though the biggest barrier is just money and trained professionals. The interprofessional teams in BC should fill this role fairly well, but don’t have enough employees to reliably meet the gaps