Somerset West Community Health Centre is committed to a satellite project that would provide services for residents just west of Centretown in the Hintonburg area.
The “Hintonburg Hub” has been an ongoing project with an aim to make quality health care accessible to all members of the Ottawa community.
“We are working diligently with our community partners to make that project a reality in the next number of months,” says Rosemary Jones, resource development manager at the health centre.
The Hintonburg Hub faced a major roadblock last spring, when one of the community partners pulled out.
Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corp., a non-profit housing organization, was forced to take a step back due to other commitments and the resignation of their director of development.
The organization had previously been in charge of locating and negotiating real estate for the project.
Their departure left the Hintonburg Hub without a home.
But Jones says plans for the new centre are still very much alive.
“I definitely think the next step for us is to secure an appropriate property in the Hintonburg area,” she says.
While the Somerset West centre plans expansion to meet the needs of the Hintonburg community, Centretown’s other community health centre recently addressed its residents’ demand for more physicians.
Last month, Centretown Community Health Centre opened its waiting list to residents without a doctor.
Four days later, the list was at its 150-person capacity and had to close again.
Lynsey James, director of primary care services at the Centretown centre, says that while dealing with the shortage of doctors is tricky, the health centre is constantly searching for ways to improve both the access and delivery of care.
“There are always opportunities to look for inefficiencies and improve so that we can try to see more patients, and we continue to do that this year,” says James.
She also noted that most of the new patients who were added to the waiting list at the Cooper Street centre will be able to be seen by a doctor before 2013.
But there are other options for residents without a family doctor, says Jones from the Somerset centre, located on Eccles Street in Chinatown.
“Somerset West offers a walk-in clinic, and that clinic is available to anyone that lives in our catchment area.”
“They do not need to have a family provider here to use that service,” says Jones.
“It is an opportunity to receive quality health care in our community while waiting for a permanent health care provider.”
The root of the shortage at the area’s health centres – a shortage that is not unique to Ottawa – is demand for services that’s simply outweighing the supply, says Mary MacNutt, of the Association of Ontario Health Centres.
“We recognize that there are many people in Ontario that still have difficulty getting just the very basic access to care,” says MacNutt.
“However, I think that improvements have been made in the past few years, just in terms of increasing access to family physicians.”
Another problem, MacNutt says, is with the way care is provided in Ontario.
“The province needs to get a better balance of how it spends its health care dollars, and right now, we need to put more emphasis on community based services like community health centres that keep people well in the first place,” she says.
“You’re getting high value for the health care dollars that are invested.”
Community health centres focus on health as a complete package, addressing mental, physical and emotional health.
They also aim to help individuals overcome barriers that might limit their access to local health care.
“We talk about education, housing, we talk about food security, we talk about income – because all of those things are such factors in peoples’ physical health,” says Jones.
“It’s about keeping people well in all kinds of areas.”
MacNutt says efforts to extend care to all parts of a community are essential.
“Often we do think of health as just something you get in a medical clinic. And health is much more than that. It really begins in our community. If we have healthy communities, that means we’re going to have healthy people.”