The Centretown Community Health Centre is touting a new report that reveals centres like it are the most effective in keeping people out of emergency rooms.
They hope this recognition will prompt more funding from the government.
The report, released by the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences states that community health centres have helped to lower emergency department visits by 21 per cent in the Champlain region alone, the provincial health district that includes Ottawa and its surrounding counties.
“(Community health centres are) a more effective point of entry,” says Jeff Morrison, a member of the Centretown health centre board of directors. “It takes away a lot of the burden, and a lot of the demand for hospitals so they can focus on more serious problems.”
The Centretown Community Health Centre, located on Cooper Street, strives to break down barriers within its community in order to better serve its members, according to its website. Centres, such as the ones in Centretown and Somerset West, work alongside other health-care providers and put a great deal of focus on the social determinants of health.
But as the number of residents in Centretown grows, so does the centre’s need for more space – an issue recently raised by the Centretown centre’s officials.
“One of the tangible outcomes that we hope this report will do, is if nothing else just provide us with more physical space,” says Morrison.
Morrison says community health centres are special in that they can shape their programming in order to fit their specific community the best. In Centretown, that means providing GLBTQ-specific programming as well as services for new immigrants and support for the large senior population.
“CHCs are very responsive to what the community is asking for,” says Morrison. “There’s no one-size fits all approach to every CHC in the province.”
Simone Thibault, the executive director of Centretown’s community health centre, says her team emphasizes the support of clients, no matter at what stage they are. It’s the continuum of care provided by community health centres that has proved to be most successful.
“If you really want to attend to the issues, you have to look at people when they’re well and starting to be ill, not just when they’re in desperate need,” Thibault says.
“You have to start at the beginning, it makes sense.”
The new ICES report compared seven different primary care models and found that CHCs “stood out in their care of disadvantaged and sicker populations and had substantially lower emergency department visit rates than expected.”
“The (community health centre) model offers an attractive alternative in many respects, but (community health centres) serve a different role than the other primary care models and are resourced and governed quite differently,” the report says. “Where they fit within primary care in Ontario should also be the subject of further policy consideration.”
The report explains decision-makers in Ontario have unique opportunity to take its findings to re-orient resources and future investments, and to redesign their approach to primary care.
“Our emergency departments are overcrowded,” says Dr. Richard Glazier, a senior scientist for ICES, and one of the authors of the report.
Glazier says that even though it may cost a lot to run these centres, there can be significant savings elsewhere in the system. The province has been spending a great deal of money on other models of primary health care, like the family health network, that haven’t provided the same savings.
“Really we have spent an incremental billion dollars a year for the last five years, it’s not small potatoes,” Glazier says.
Last month, economist Don Drummond praised Community Health Centres. He reported that the health care system needed to be less hospital-centric and more community-based in order to help lift Ontario out of its $16 billion deficit.
Drummond produced a report commissioned by the Ontario government, to revamp provincial public service. Drummond says health care should be shifting its attention from “after-the-problem treatment” to health promotion.