A "personal passion" for health care and experience with large-scale and community-based health-care service providers.
A "personal passion" for health care and experience with large-scale and community-based health-care service providers.
These are the ingredients Michelle Thompson, the Peaks to Prairies Primary Care Network’s newly hired executive director, is bringing to the communities of Olds and Sundre to help make the new network successful.
"Rural health care is definitely my passion," she said. "Health care in general, rural health care specifically and also primary care because that’s where I really, as a private citizen but also professionally, believe that primary care can make the single greatest impact in health care, I think, anywhere in the country but I know for sure in Alberta."
Thompson, whose first day of work for the network was Aug. 12, started her career in health care with the Calgary Regional Health Authority in 1998 where her focus was human resources.
She said she gained "a broad understanding of health care in Alberta" during her 10 years with the authority and therefore has a strong knowledge of how the provincial health-care system works that will be beneficial for the new network.
"I think that gives me an advantage coming in knowing I still have contacts within Calgary and Edmonton," Thompson said.
In 2008, her personal life took her to Bermuda where she worked as a human resources project manager with the Bermuda Hospitals Board until this summer.
While there, she saw how a health-care service provider can have a more intimate connection with the community since the island has a population less than one-10th of Calgary’s.
"With Bermuda Hospitals Board, what that really gave me was an opportunity to see how my contribution, as an employee of that organization, directly impacts the community as well as the organization itself," Thompson said. "So you know what the community expects from you. You know the impacts of what your administrative decisions or your clinical decisions are making on the community."
Through mixing these contrasting dynamics of health-care service provision and working with the community of physicians in Olds and Sundre, Thompson said she believes she can help make the network here a model for other networks across Alberta and even the country.
"I think there’s everything that these communities need to make this successful: a group of physicians that are very engaged in the community, a board of this primary care network who is very engaged, who is very focused on making this a success, very supportive of me in my new role already."
Although she will be based at Olds’ Wildrose Medical Centre, Thompson said she will remain "mobile" between Sundre and Olds.
Dr. Jaco Hoffman, the network’s co-chair and secretary who is based in Olds, describes the network as a collaboration amongst people in various health-care fields to identify and fill gaps in local health-care services using local resources.
He said before it goes live in late autumn, a number of "logistics" still have to be worked out.
These logistics include setting up a computer network and an accounting structure for the network.
While Thompson is helping to sort out some of these challenges, he added, she is scheduled to meet physicians from Olds and Sundre on Sept. 12.
Norm McInnis, the Town of Olds’ chief administrative officer, said he believes the primary care network concept for Olds and Sundre came about partly because of a "conclusion that we came to as a community that attraction of physicians is great, but retaining them is probably a bigger challenge for us in the long run."
The question, he said, is how does a community support doctors and their quality of life so they can support the quality of life of people in the community?
"This primary care network does both of that," McInnis said, adding the network will help encourage physicians to stay as it will take pressure off of their clinical practices and allows doctors to coordinate with other professionals in health care.
McInnis also said the Town of Olds is willing to look at providing space in the community for network operations so that the funding the network receives from the province can go towards programming and service.
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