Source: St. Catharines Standard
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Plans to establish a new facility for training primary care physicians in Niagara are moving forward, with the hope of opening its doors by 2028.
But the next step is to find a suitable medical office to accommodate the new Primary Care Teaching Clinic, first announced by the provincial government in January as part of an $8-million investment to plan for the development of 16 new and expanded teaching clinics across Ontario.
Niagara family physician recruiter Jill Croteau said McMaster University’s department of family medicine, which is leading the project in partnership with others, will meet with physicians who are interested in expanding their practices to incorporate the training facilities to accommodate medical students completing residencies in family medicine.
“They are doing an information session for physicians in June to answer questions about how to submit an expression of interest in this,” Croteau said. “There will be certain criteria that the group will be looking for and factors that come into play when they’re making a decision based on community readiness.”
She said the new teaching clinic will likely be set up in an existing medical office with roughly 557 square metres (6,000 square feet) of available space, as opposed to building a new facility. It needs to be large enough to accommodate eight student physicians at a time, with four physicians being brought in during each of the two years the program runs.
The new clinic will be designed to support both patient care and teaching, including clinical space, learner space, supervision requirements, administrative supports and the broader infrastructure needed to support a high-quality teaching environment.
“There could be renovations or potentially funding for infrastructure changes, but I don’t think they’re looking to fund a new build,” Croteau said.
While McMaster University has been providing medical students with placements at existing clinics throughout Niagara for years, she said the Primary Care Teaching Clinics are “a newer concept.”
Rather than embedding students in existing clinics, she said the Primary Care Teaching Clinic will be a dedicated facility for student education rather than placing students at existing medical offices.
Nancy Devlin, managing director for education enterprise at McMaster University, said Niagara physicians were informed about the information session on Wednesday in the hope of identifying existing clinics with physicians interested in participating.
“Part of the project is to find a location, but also to identify physicians that are going to be willing to either create new practices or transfer their practices to the space for training more residents in the region,” she said.
“We’re looking for a minimum of four physicians to have four clinical practices there … The idea would be that each of the physicians would have a resident attached to them.”
That’s in addition to a family health team model that would include other health-care professionals such as nurse practitioners, Devlin said.
While the plan will immediately add four more physicians to Niagara’s roster of family doctors, Niagara Medical Group Family Health Team executive director Frank Ruberto, who has been working with Croteau and the university on the project, said the benefit of the training clinic “is about more than opening clinical space.”
“It is about creating a sustainable teaching environment,” where the student physicians can “build relationships with patients, physicians, communities and the broader health system,” Ruberto said in a media release. “That connection is what helps turn training placements into long-term practice decisions.”