You will have seen the press release from Interior Health announcing that Dr. Obu and Dr. Zake will be joining Dr. Govindasamy in the Ashcroft Family Medical Practice beginning on Tuesday, March 1.
Currently the College of Physicians and Surgeons and Interior Health are completing the required paper work for their BC Licenses to be issued. Once the paperwork is completed the clinic will be able to begin booking appointments for the patients at the clinic. If you are wanting an appointment, please call the clinic after Feb. 22.
We want to thank the Village of Ashcroft, BC Transit, Interior Health and the First Nations Health Authority for all their work and support to allow us to conduct the Outreach Clinic in Lillooet for November, December and January. This was not an ideal solution, however, it did allow us to create some continuity of care for patients.
Thanks to the wonderful support from our Regional Medical Director, Dr. Nancy Humber, we are working with two project coordinators. One is assisting to create an assessment of the current situation in each community in our catchment area, looking at the identified needs and priorities of each community and creating a plan to assist us in moving towards creating a new model of rural health care delivery. The second project coordinator is assisting in developing strategies for the medical personnel to improve support to clients in long term care and creating a catchment area approach to locum coverage to support all the doctors in our area.
Our current priority is integrating our doctors into our community and helping them and their families make this home and a place they want to stay. We continue our recruiting efforts and will keep the community informed as developments happen.
The Wellness and Health Action Coalition will be supporting the Princeton Support Our Health Care group with a community consultation in February and if a group at UBC Okanagan receives the funding for their research grant we will be helping them define ways that community groups are best able to create and sustain better levels of health care in rural areas.
We are slowly developing a rich resource and reference section on our website www.whac-chb.ca . We also post our minutes and other relevant information on the site. If you are not a member please consider joining, the membership form is on the website or can be picked up at People’s Drug Mart in Ashcroft.
Alice Durksen