A new nurse practitioner clinic aims to fill gaps in Thunder Bay’s health care by providing services through the clinic, virtually, and by home visits.
Encompass Healthcare, which offers a fee-for-service model, has opened across from Wendy’s Restaurant on Red River Road in the Shopper’s Drug Mart building.
Lead nurse practitioner Katrina Hill, owner of the clinic, employs nurse practitioner Bonnie Zabirka and shares clinical space with foot care nurse Laura Kay and her Caring Soles Footcare Service business.
“We’re used to a model of care where it’s very short appointments, one item, emergency rooms that are overbooked because there aren’t any providers available for normal, mundane things,” Hill said.
“My goal was to try and help offset that a little bit by providing the patient with more comfortable care, easy accessibility by being able to book online or call for appointments and to be able to access primary care within two weeks.”
Hill explained the benefits of fee-for-service as an alternative to try and offload the system.
“Nurse practitioners in Canada cannot bill their provincial health entity, and that’s part of the Canada Health Act,” she said.
“At the time that the Canada Health Act was created, nurse practitioners’ scope of practice was very minimal. Now our scope of practice has expanded and the health-care act has not changed. Nurse practitioners exist in various models of care, like community health or nurse practitioner-led clinics which are funded models of care, and are salary based.”
She added that doctors can also hire a nurse practitioner and pay their salary, but there’s no direct billing for nurse practitioners.
“Fee-for-service allows for the patient to choose what type of appointment they may want. All of the items such as blood work, diagnostics, and all of the expected services outside of my time are still covered by OHIP,” Hill said. “I’m not looking to make millions. My goal is still to provide the care and be able to pay myself some sort of salary.”
Hill says it’s important to understand what a nurse practitioner does.
“We are trained differently than physicians, and the typical nurse practitioner has 10 years of nursing experience, so we have a certain amount of training being a registered nurse, and then the nurse practitioner program on top of that, trains us to be a clinician that provides orders versus receiving them, and we work well in teams,” she said.
Hill surmised around 10,000 people in Thunder Bay don’t have any form of a health-care provider and are using walk-in clinics.
“Some have disease processes that need to be monitored and don’t have a continuity of care, so a nurse practitioner model is economical. It provides continuity and I think there’s a lot of room for more nurse practitioner care.”
Hill said she would love the ability for nurse practitioners to roster patients in Ontario. Rostering patients means registering patients with family practices, doctors or teams. Her clinic has room to accept new patients, which she welcomes.
