Thank you, Mr. Hanley.
I do remember that canoeing experience quite well, actually.
The team-based model of care is one that we're trying to promote at the moment, and it is already in place in some provinces. Family health teams in Ontario, groupes de médecine de famille in Quebec and PCNs in Alberta are some examples of models of care where there is access to a family physician for every person in the practice but where the family doctor also has the opportunity to work with other providers.
We have pharmacists in this virtual room today, and a pharmacist is an important member of the clinical team. We also have social workers, nurse practitioners, clinical nurses, dietitians and physiotherapists. The decision as to which providers we privilege as members of a team depends in part on the population that is served. For these models I've described, there is generally an analysis of who it is that a practice is serving, and then, based on some demographic information, there's a decision made as to which types of providers might be best suited to offer support in providing the best care for that patient population.
For myself, I worked for several years in such a model in Toronto when I was in clinical practice, and that was an example of this, so I had fairly close interaction with the clinical pharmacist in that team, particularly for the frail and elderly patients I was looking after those who were on more than six medications. Every year, the pharmacist would review those patients, and we'd have a conversation about whether all of the drugs were appropriate, whether we could trim one or two or whether there were drug interactions to be mindful of.
Of course, in that practice, we provided immunizations, and clinical nurses were important providers to help us with administering immunizations and identifying people who were due their immunizations who had not had them, so working closely with nurses is very important.
We often don't talk about the receptionists. Certainly, every practice has a receptionist, and having enhanced roles for the receptionists also helped to streamline that care.
I could go on, but these are some examples. In the team I was on, we had a social worker, and the social worker was really quite critical for patients who were dependent on funding from social services, in terms of identifying some potential sources of funding and working with those patients on some of these applications and forms to fill out.