HERALD NEWS
By Fram Dinshaw
NOVA SCOTIA — A veteran nurse practitioner says that healthcare could roll into town on wheels as Nova Scotia shifts to a new healthcare model — and grapples with an acute doctor shortage.
Mobile clinics are already widely used in Saskatchewan, where the ‘Health Bus’ does the rounds in inner-city Saskatoon, offering walk-in services to patients including recent immigrants and First Nations who often have trouble accessing a doctor. Further afield, the Screening Program for Breast Cancer runs a coach that makes stops in rural communities across the province, providing testing for those who need it.
And nurse practitioner Carolyn Mitchell reckons health on wheels may be a way to serve rural communities bereft of doctors.
“It could,” said Mitchell.
But for mobile healthcare to truly work, either as a stopgap to ease the doctor shortage or as part of Nova Scotia’s emerging collaborative care system, patient care must be properly tracked.
It also means mobile clinic doctors, nurse practitioners, and other healthcare professionals building up what Mitchell calls a “therapeutic relationship,” with their patients. Building up a rapport — typically developed between family doctors and their patients — allows people to more easily trust medical staff when treating their most intimate health issues.
“The patients really need to be cared for and they feel cared for when they get to know the health professional,” said Mitchell.
As such, mobile healthcare could lay the foundations in isolated communities for the new collaborative healthcare approach that the government has started rolling out across Nova Scotia.
Continue reading the story on the Herald News website.
Some 2,000 mobile health programs addressing primary care and preventive services to underserved communities operate in the U.S. View a Mobile Health Map for some locations.
Take a tour of a Health Bus by the Saskatoon Health Region, M.D. Ambulance and the Ministry of Health.