South Country Medical Clinic physicians and nurse practitioners strive to provide consistent services and care to people who live in Assiniboia and surrounding area.
Dr. Glaeske and Dr. Pradhan are working with Dr. Carulei to provide continuous 24 hour coverage in Dr. Gauthier’s absence. The Five Hills Health Region is continuing to recruit another full-time physician to Assiniboia in order to ensure predictable and stable services for the area.
Beginning December 16th, 2011, Dr. Glaeske and Dr. Pradhan will only be seeing patients at the South Country Medical Clinic. By staying in Assiniboia they are able to respond to an emergency patient at the hospital.
They can see 8 more patients per day in Assiniboia in the time they would otherwise spend travelling to a visiting site.
Nurse practitioners Johanne Rust and Jana Stensland will continue to provide their regular two day per week visiting services to Willow Bunch, Rockglen and Mossbank.
The physicians and nurse practitioners work together to provide consistency in meeting patient care needs even if seen in different locations.
Here are some things that you can do to support your physicians so they don’t get exhausted from the extra workload:
1. Check your medications and if you require refills request to have all your medications refilled at the same time – rather than multiple requests for one medication refill at a time - this significantly reduces the volume of refill requests coming in each day for the physician to sign.
2. Use the Emergency Room for emergencies only – shortness of breath, chest pain, high fevers, bleeding is always important to present in emergency to be checked out. Many of the visits people make to emergency are for concerns they have had for several days and could be better cared for at an office visit that does not require the physician to return to the hospital after hours.
3. Use Healthline Advice line at 1-877-800-0002. The advice line is answered by Registered Nurses 24 hours a day – you have someone to call in the middle of the night!! They will ask you lots of questions because they cannot see you – based on what you tell them and how well you describe your health needs, they will help you determine whether you can see your family physician in the office or whether you should be seen in the emergency department.
4. Be responsible for your health - to stay healthy – use the online library at http://www.health.gov.sk.ca/healthline-online - it is a great resource for information about keeping healthy, calculators and quizzes, decision support tools to assist you in deciding what treatment might be the right one for you and many resources on different health conditions. This information and tools help you to ask your health care provider questions that you need answers to make good decisions about your health.
